My wife and I have just recently had our first child and I’m looking at getting a decent baby monitor (or security camera) setup.
Our place is not very big at all (think a studio with a separate bedroom/bathroom). I was given a cheap security camera to use for now but I want to start planning for when we move into a bigger apartment (security cameras) and a generally better system for monitoring our baby when we are in another room and cannot hear.
Should I invest in a baby monitor now or would it be better to invest in a decent security camera system instead?
I’m based in the EU and am quite tech-savvy so I don’t have a problem setting things up myself if it means a better system.
It’s hard to hear with the first baby, but YAGNI (“You aren’t going to need it”) applies.
Unless your baby was born with political enemies, (it’s fine to) get a simple rechargeable audio monitor.
Source: for my first kid I setup a secure wireless camera with night vision. For my latest kid I got a cheapo glorified walkie talkie. They’re both fine (the kids are both fine, and the solutions are both fine.)
We like having one because our little one does some funny stuff sometimes.
It has been useful before for telling what kind of crying he’s doing. You can tell a lot from audio, but audio/video has helped sometimes.
I’m not having another kid but if I did I would do my exact setup still. Audio to wake me up and video to see if a response is needed or if they need to cry it out.
Whatever you do, don’t talk to the kid if you are not in the room. Two way monitor is a bug not a feature.
Made that mistake once, kid was crying I thought it would be comforting to hear me… Nope, disembodied voice freaked the fuck out of the poor little dude.
The extra 30-40s of crying while I walk up stairs is way better than the hour of hugs to get him back to sleep.
It’s been a long time (my kids are 8 and 10) so I’m sure features have changed but I figured I’d chime in with my favorite baby monitor feature. Not all of them had it but I found it invaluable.
I think ours were Samsungs? And they had a “vox” feature. Essentially, if the room was quiet, the monitor screen and microphone would turn off. If there was a noise, it would pop back on. (In this way, it’s different than an audio-only monitor which I presume is on all the time.)This allowed me to sleep (when sleep was available…rarely with our first) and be awoken when needed. I was way too sleep deprived for Nest Cam alerts on my phone to actually get through to me, especially since they popped up once; if I missed it then, it wasn’t going to keep nudging me.
That said, the monitors themselves were cheaply manufactured junk, and not inexpensive. I liked the vox feature enough that when the first one started having problems with the antenna, we bought a second one and immediately taped the antenna down. Hopefully you have better options out there these days.
We have a cheap WiFi camera with PTZ hooked into Frigate. It has been really great, although I ended up buying another wifi AP because our 2.4Ghz is pretty crowded with IoT stuff.
Congrats for the baby!
I also use this. I added sound recognition (crying) with a homeassistant notification on the phone. It works like a charm. You can use it to trigger some other automations, like turning on a light in the room you are, or playing a sound on a speaker.
