Now the reason I'm wanting a consumer home monitoring solution is not to replace my HSSP but to compliment it with some video surveillance monitoring of what goes on around the outside of my house. I am extremely interested in knowing that there might have been a stranger(s) who walked by my house at any time during the day/night. The ability of having a pro-active security system to monitor the outside and receive immediate alerts if anything gets triggered is a very comforting experience to have. I set out to look for a consumer product that can do just that and the first one I installed was the Motorola Homesight Wireless kit HMEZ2000.

Im a big fan of wireless devices, so when I found out that the Motorola Homesight product had wireless cameras/devices that could be implemented I was excited. The installation of the Homesight application went without any issues and getting the cameras all discovered went pretty smoothly also. I thought this was too good to be true! The wireless kit actually comes with one day camera, and a door/window sensor which I wasnt interested in since my HSSP again completely covers all things related to break-ins. I was pleased to find out that the system can accomodate upto 12 wireless and 3 wired cameras. I went ahead and hooked up a couple of the day and day/night cameras, it was pretty simple to find nice vantage view points from the inside looking out (i.e. front/back doors, upstairs looking out over the yards and driveways, etc) and luckily all the cameras stayed within the range for I was able to monitor all of them in unison.

The Homesight application was a little bit lacking in terms of user-friendliness and ease of use for speed purposes.. setting up alerts on each monitor and having to key in notifications was pretty simple thanks to the tabbed sections (Condition, Action, Notification). Naturally I setup everything to email me and SMS me and on the prowl I went.

I've got to say that the day/night camera did a pretty decent job in capturing a sharp image. Thanks to the infra-red engineers at Motorola! The notifications with an image came through without a hitch, and I also had the videos saved onto the computer for record keeping purposes. The videos were saved in AVI format and the camera's even have a microphone built into them so if the 'perp' says anything you might have the luxury of capturing their voices too.

Since it is Motorola, they have a lot of accessories available that can tremendously increase the flexibility and scope of the system. They've got temperature sensors, power controllers, motion sensors, waters sensors, and a keypad kit to allow for immediate arm/disarm without touching your PC. I soon enough realized that Homesight could also be used for automation purposes. I could setup the system to have a motion sensor setup in a particular room and once it detects movement it could trigger a power controller to light that rooms respective lamp as you walked in.

It's nice to see a product that focuses on the monitoring aspect more than the technology configuration requirements and implementation. I was able to get this completely configured within 2 hours, without any interference from my existing wireless network. I definitely would recommend this product for the price and functionality it has to offer.