[danielpal]

One of the biggest issues with Nest is that they pretend to be a serious company that takes cares of your home needs (security/monitoring, fire & gas prevention and heating) but their products are toy like in that respect.

However I own 3 cameras and the fire alarm. The fire alarm, is worthless, I eventually disconnected it given the large amount of false positives. Then there are the cameras. I travel a lot so wanted a system that allowed me to monitor my home remotely for security purposes. However, I soon found out they are pretty much gimmick and any burglar will by-pass their security. If you own a nest cam, be aware that if the cam is disconnected from your Wifi, it will take 30 MINUTES FOR NEST TO NOTIFY YOU.

What did I learned? Burglars will power off the electricity in you house upon entry - to prevent alarms etc from sounding. This will bring you Wifi and your cameras down. Don't worry, 30 minutes later, or approximately 20 minutes after burglars have left, you'll know.

You'll also only be able to set notifications via email and push, so if you are sleeping you're out of luck. I was thinking of hacking a system with Twilio to do an automated call upon the email being received, but after finding out that it would take 30 minutes to even be notified I gave up.

Nest is cool, easy to setup and the cameras look nice, but they are toys. Other products might be hard to setup, look uglier but work. I'd rather they did both, but if I have to chose between ugly and works, and beautiful but doesn't - i'll take the first.

[lurkinggrue]

Lets be serious here ... how often to people cut the power to the house?

[ebcase]

Fwiw, a few UPS devices (for battery backup) could help out in this scenario.

[goldenkey]

This is what most security companies do if they are any good. A battery backup with cell connection. Can easily replicate it yourself using a mobile hotspot on an old phone. Along with some usb battery packs. Pretty cheap and easy to make a solution. (Under $50)

[danielpal]

It would require me to back-up the ISP router, the Apple Wifi router and 3 cameras - so 5 UPS. Yet even if I did that, given that my Internet connection comes via fiber, if they cut the Fiber, I am still out-of-luck.

It's as if an alarm company said, we will notify you after 30 minutes if someone comes into you house.