My nest cameras are failing
January 2019 I purchased two Nest Cam IQs, and other than a bad cable that fried two cameras in a row it’s been a pretty unremarkable experience. Both of them however decided to stop working at night five years and 3 months into service.
It started with one of my front cameras. It went to night vision all the time at first meaning daytime was unrecognizable and nighttime was just normally bad video. The camera out back started looking like I was looking at a completely destroyed piece of reddish cellophane at night.
Both cases I suspect are due to the IR filter that gets moved into place at night. The damaged one for the rear camera looks a bit like water intrusion turned to ice and expanded on a gel filter, and my guess for the front yard camera is that the mechanism that moves the filter into place is no longer functioning. Either way I have no night vision on two cameras, and suspect it probably had something to do with them being extremely cold earlier this year.
The other functions of the camera work fine, so for daylight they’re great and for me, with a whole lot of cameras to test, it’s not a huge issue but is kind of annoying when you’re no longer able to purchase the same cameras and functionality with Nest Aware, and the current Google offerings are not something I would consider (I got one, the Home App still an incomplete mess. Enough of that.)
