At-Home Review: Eufy Floodlight Camera

Having personally installed hardwired floodlight cameras before (I own two older Ring models), I was a bit surprised by the installation and setup process for the Eufy floodlight.

When you unbox the Eufy, it has a power cord wired onto it (something I’ve never seen before on three other floodlight camera models). That’s because Eufy has you plug it into an outlet and set it up in the Eufy Security app before you wire it into the electrical box for the floodlight.

Thankfully, the setup process was quick and straightforward. All I had to do was connect the camera to WiFi and the Eufy Security app, and I was ready to install the camera. At this point, you have to unplug the camera and disconnect the power cord from the camera’s wiring so that you can wire it into an electrical box.

Of course, you first need to remove your existing floodlight before you can proceed. That involves turning off the power at your breaker box, removing the screws holding the floodlight in place, and disconnecting the line, neutral, and ground wires from the old floodlight.

Once it’s removed, you can begin installing the Eufy Floodlight Camera. The Eufy app offers a detailed installation video to help you through each step of the process. When you factor in removing the old floodlight and installing the floodlight camera, the whole process took me about 45 minutes to complete. When I was done, all I had to do was turn the power back on and the camera was ready to roll.

The Eufy Floodlight Camera doesn’t offer many smart features, but what it does have—monitoring zones and voice control—seems to work quite well.

For example, though there are no AI-based alerts (where the camera uses artificial intelligence to alert you if motion was caused by people, animals, etc.) like you get with Arlo’s competing camera, the Eufy camera’s motion detection works very well, even picking up a stray black cat walking through my driveway in the middle of the night. But because motion detection is table stakes for all security cameras, we don’t really consider it a smart feature.

Here’s more information on Eufy’s smart features, plus my thoughts on how they worked:

• Monitoring zones: This feature, which Eufy calls Activity Zones, allows you to highlight certain areas that the camera “sees” to receive motion alerts from movement only in those areas. Eufy’s activity zones work well, but they aren’t as easy to customize as those from competing floodlight cameras from Arlo and Ring. Those models let you make zones in all sorts of different shapes to easily cover a zig-zagging driveway or curved yard, but Eufy’s activity zones have to be either square or rectangular. Because the edge of my front yard isn’t a straight line, I had to use two rectangular activity zones to effectively cover it. It’s not a major concern, per se, but it would be nice if this feature was a bit more flexible.
• Voice control: This floodlight camera works with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant so that you can control the camera with your voice or control it alongside your other smart home devices all in one app. When I initially set up the feature and asked Alexa and Google to pull up live feeds from the camera (using my Amazon Echo Show 10 and Google Nest Hub smart displays), neither assistant was able to do so. But when I tried again a few days later, they were able to play live feeds from the camera without a problem (and I have no idea why that happened). Both assistants can also control the lights of the floodlight camera, which is a nice little bonus feature. Unfortunately, two-way audio doesn’t work with either assistant. You can speak with visitors only via the Eufy Security app.

If you’re trying to stick to a budget and avoid monthly fees, the Eufy Floodlight Camera is a no-brainer. It offers decent video quality, motion detection, and smart features for the money.

Its only flaw is that it’s not as feature-rich as competitors like the Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight Camera, $250, and Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro, $250, which I also tried out. (For example, the Arlo and Ring can distinguish people from other types of motion.) Still, the Eufy is a solid security camera.