Exploring UniFi Protect

Testing out Ubiquiti cameras

I’ve always had thoughts that my future home, wherever that may be, would have some form of security camera set up. I feel like I would take greater comfort in leaving my home empty if I’m living alone, if I knew I could check up on it at any time. Maybe there’ll be a dog in my future so I’m not entirely alone, but all in all it’s become more common for me to hear about others who’ve gone about setting up security cameras or even smart door bells.

I think the smart door bell has a bit more utility. I wear noise cancelling headphones a lot of the time, so I wouldn’t hear a door bell going off. Or, my office could be facing away from the front of the house if it so happens to have a window. Nest and Ring are brands that get mentioned a lot in this space. Unfortunately for me anyway, they’re owned by Google and Amazon respectively. The nature of the footage of these cameras being stored off site by a third party is not exactly appealing to me, ideally a solution where the footage is stored locally while still being remotely viewable is an ideal scenario.

There’s various options out there for what I described, Wyze gets mentioned a lot in the self hosting space, especially if you flash their cameras. For me, being already in the Ubiquiti eco system thanks to UniFi Network, I decided to give UniFi Protect a go. Storage wasn’t that big an issue, for this proof of concept. My UDM-Pro already has a drive bay, so I went ahead and acquired a 4TB Seagate Skyhawk drive. Skyhawk is their lineup of surveillance drives, since I already use their IronWolfs in my NAS I figured this would work just fine too. The next order of business was cameras.

Now since this was still in a proof of concept stage, I wasn’t going to be buying cameras I had to mount into the ceiling or wall. Plus, I wanted a camera that would work in a rental scenario where you’re probably not even allowed to do that kind of work, lest you wish to say goodbye to your deposit. Fortunately Ubiquiti did think of this and they have several, ‘turret’ style cameras that you can just plonk on the desk. Unfortunately, the ones I wanted, the G3 Flex, were out of stock. They had the G3 Instants, but I really wanted to experiment with Power over Ethernet, so I wanted an excuse. It took a few weeks of refreshing the store, but I did end up getting two G3 Flex’s in my hands.

I gotta say, I really like the system. Set up was pretty instant, much like the network line of Ubiquiti products. Just plug in and it gets detected and you just need to adopt it. The mobile app works great and lets me remote in to the cameras. I’m pretty happy with storage usage too, retaining around three weeks of recordings while having an estimated capacity of one month, on continuous recording mode. I do wish I wasn’t locking myself into another ecosystem, or more like locking myself even more into an existing one. But, I do have the UNVR on my wishlist for a future home. They just released a pro version of their doorbell into early access, which I’d love to have. All in all, I’m happy with UniFi Protect! Here’s to a few months or years down the line when I expand my deployment and really put it through its paces!