ByJesse Ferrell, AccuWeather meteorologist and senior weather editor
Published Dec 2, 2014 1:04 PM EDT
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Updated Dec 30, 2014 2:25 PM EDT
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A few months ago, we wanted to expand the AccuCam weather webcam network beyond our headquarters here in Pennsylvania, so we, and the Internet at large, could see weather conditions at various locations. Y-Cam, a tech company from the United Kingdom, helped us get started.
NEW!
HomeMonitor's older inside camera is on sale on Amazon today for $149. The previous sale ($99 for the newer model on Black Friday) has ended. (The camera on sale today is the older model, which has SD, not HD, picture quality).
Y-Cam's HomeMonitor line of "cloud" surveillance cameras have two main advantages compared to competitors.
1. They come with a week's worth of motion recording for free, unlike some competitors, which charge at least $10-$25/mo for that service. What I mean by "cloud" of course is not clouds in the meteorological sense, but rather a webcam that streams video to a remote computer, so you don't have to store the video on your computer -- and so that it's more secure.
2. They have outside cameras that operate between -4 to 140 degrees F. Making outside cameras comes with a whole set of challenges, and that's why you don't see the other cloud webcam companies doing it.
The HomeMonitor line of cameras reviewed here have 720p (1280x720) video with audio, but they also sell 1080p HD cameras with local non-cloud storage. The HomeMonitor line streams from the cloud to your computer, cell phone or tablet with Android and iPhone apps.
We placed 14 outside and inside Y-Cams (both the inside HomeMonitor HD and the outdoor HomeMonitor HD Pro) at eight different locations during Spring and Summer 2014.
- State College, Pennsylvania: Home of AccuWeather HQ- Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania: Home of the Weather Discovery Center- Johnstown, Pennsylvania: At the Inclined Plane where over 200" of snow falls each winter- Altoona, Pennsylvania: At the Railroaders Museum & At Blue Knob Ski Resort- Kittanning, Pennsylvania: Downtown, hosted by the city (temporarily offline)- York, Pennsylvania- Rehoboth Beach, Delaware: To show hurricanes, nor'easters and thunderstorms approaching the coast- Rancho Cucamonga, California: /strong> At one of our remote AccuWeather offices (not yet installed)
These added to the existing AccuCam network, which already had cameras in York, Pennsylvania, Wichita, Kansas, Boomer, North Carolina, and soon we will install a camera in our New York City office. You can see all the cameras we installed on the AccuCam page.
Once motion is recorded and uploaded to the HomeMonitor cloud (again, free last seven days of motion), you can watch or download the videos (MP4 format). The examples below show the Johnstown Incline rail cars in the fog.
INTENSE TESTING:
We tested the cameras intensely in a number of real-world environment situations. As always with webcams, there were many challenges with installation and maintenance, most of which weren't specific to Y-Cam. When possible, we tried to hard-wire the cameras into a router because this seemed to correlate with better and more reliable performance. Some of the cameras, like the ones installed at the Altoona Railroaders' Museum and the Johnstown Incline, performed flawlessly over months of testing.
When wifi was spotty or weak, the Y-Cams sometimes required rebooting; in two cases that didn't work, and they had to be returned for replacements. My guess here is that, because these were early pre-release versions of the systems; they had bugs that were later fixed in the consumer versions. Their support staff are very responsive, although they are on a different time-zone, being in the U.K., which is something to keep in mind.
CHALLENGED WITH SNOW INTERNET, SNOW, RAIN AND LIGHTNING:
Most of the problems we had were site-specific. At Kittanning, we put the camera at the top of a tower downtown and it failed twice -- if I had to guess, I'd say due to lightning and old electrical work in the building. We are working to put a new camera inside a window there. At Punxsutawney, the weak wifi gave us issues with the outside camera, which was pointed at Punxsutawney Phil's burrow, and the camera was eventually taken down because they couldn't hardwire it. We're going to try again there next spring.
At Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, both the wifi and the power were unreliable, and the camera couldn't be hard-wired. At the Johnstown Incline, water got inside the camera and we had to replace it; this seemed to be because of a loose casing -- the casing screws apart and if you check the tightness of it before you use the outside camera, you should be OK. This should be an unusual occurrence -- Y-Cam has documented their cameras going underwater.
As one would expect from any webcam, we experienced slow video transmission and occasional failures when downloading images from the cameras at locations that had satellite internet (Altoona Horseshoe Curve & Blue Knob Ski Resort). The HomeMonitor cameras do have an "SD" setting which we turned on to improve reliability at these locations. The fact that the cameras worked at all with the slow upload of satellite is a miracle in itself. The uploading of motion detection videos to Y-Cam's servers was very difficult via the satellite locations and eventually we disabled that functionality in favor of having a more reliable camera feed overall.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
Most of their security cameras are sold for private surveillance. Because we generally showcase public weather cameras, we pushed them to provide public embed codes for the cameras for our and our clients websites. They provided these to us and we continue to use them as part of a beta test. We also wanted static JPGs for the websites. This was not something they could provide at the time of testing, so we used a plugin/extension in the firefox browser called iMacros to save the images off, then FTP them to our servers. This is how the AccuCams page is able to show the latest shots from the camera; the embed codes are used for the "Live" portion of that page.
