Setup and Performance

Before putting the Video Doorbell Dual to use I did need to get things installed. Because this is battery powered I found it to be easiest to set everything up inside together and then go install the Video Doorbell Dual outside. You will need to download the eufy Security app and sign up for an account on that. If you have used any other Anker devices however they do share around between them. My AnkerWorks account worked with eufy and with SoundCore as well so at least you don’t need multiple accounts. With that setup, you first need to hook up the Homebase 2 which is simple. You plug in the power and hook the ethernet up if you have that option. From there in the app, you can add a device and scan the QR code on the homebase and it will walk you through everything. Even with ethernet hooked up, it asked me to set up my wireless network, the Homebase 2 will default back to that if the wired connection is disconnected. Once set up it will check for firmware updates before you go any farther.

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Once you get that done you can then attach the Video Doorbell Dual which you have to press and hold the sync button on the back of the doorbell until it beeps and the LED flashes. You then use the QR code that pops up on your phone and hold it up to the doorbell and it will scan and connect.

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Once you have both devices connected everything will be working. You then just need to install the Video Doorbell Dual outside. You have to decide if you need the small wedge that gives the doorbell some angle and where you want to install it. Being battery powered you really can put it anywhere but they do have suggestions for height and location which they walk you through on the app. You have the mounting screws and the mounting plate and if needed the sticker with the drill holes lined up so you can install the mounting plate. Ours went in without a problem on our doorbell plate. Because this is where our wired doorbell would go I did also pull the doorbell wires through and hook them to the Video Doorbell Dual as well. You can also use the small connection wires and wire nuts if you want. Sadly our transformer isn’t hooked up so this won't be powering things just yet but with that option that is on the list for future me.

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Ignore the cobwebs here and there, I’ve been fighting with spiders this year who seemingly want to turn my house into a haunted house. But the Video Doorbell Dual just barely fits on our mounting plate and I didn’t go with the wedge but with our steps being extremely small it does mean no matter where I put the Video Doorbell Dual the railing is going to be in front of it, but a wedge isn’t going to change that.

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With everything set up, I have been living with the Video Doorbell Dual and I can talk a little about how things have been going so far. For reference, we have 9 cameras on the outside of our house/property so being able to see what is going on at any moment isn’t new to us but there were a few things about the Video Doorbell Dual that stood out immediately. Our home camera setup uses AI to try to cut down false positives but I have been extremely impressed with how the Video Doorbell Dual combined multiple motion detections to cut down on false alerts. So much so that I have yet to get one with the Video Doorbell Dual so far in our use and I have used the combination of the eufy alerts with the notifications from our normal cameras to ignore alerts from people walking down the street or sidewalk. Because of this, it does have an interesting side effect as well, fewer or in this case, no false alarms mean fewer alerts saved to the storage so storage space is hardly impacted by my introverted self. We get notifications of deliveries, of my wife or myself going outside to get the mail or deliveries, and once a week alerts from me zooming by on the mower. For the notifications shown below for the 8th I had 5 from the Video Doorbell Dual and my main front door camera had 15 that it let me know about and 500+ that the AI filtered out. The events page lists out all of your alerts and videos and it also gives you a picture of the face of the person in the video or if there are multiple people it will show all of the faces it picked up.

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When in the eufy Security app you can check on the power usage of the Video Doorbell Dual and pick how you want it to handle things. I didn’t charge the Video Doorbell Dual before installing it so our charge is down to 68% and it will have to wait for long-term usage before we get a full idea of how battery life is but currently, I am seeing somewhere about 1% of battery life a day when on the balanced setting but this should improve when I stop opening up the app and looking at the live view. But unless the life is better when fully charged the 3-6 months is looking to lean towards the 3 months. But what stood out to me here is you can also see the total number of detected events and how many have been filtered out which is good information.

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As far as video quality goes, you do get crisp video, especially from the main 2k camera. I was also impressed with its nighttime performance as well and I included a picture of that below. But it’s the combination of the two cameras and how they implement them in the app that I like the most. You can do picture and picture to have the main camera in a larger view or in vertical mode you have one on top of the other and it does a great job of lining up. Even with our small front porch which ends up putting the mailbox and our railing in front of the Video Doorbell Dual the wide field of view of the top camera sees our entire neighborhood and anyone walking anywhere near the front door and then the package camera has an eye on any packages that end up below.

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Video of getting packages shows the fluidness between the two cameras better I think so I do have that as well. The microphone also does a great job of picking up any noise at all. You can even hear the Amazon guy taking his picture stepped back away from the door.

A cool little feature that I ran into when digging around in the app is if you have a video saved you have the option to donate it. This lets you put a comment and share it with eufy. I’m sure their social media team would love to get their hands on any interesting things that happen but what got me excited about this is that you can share issues that you run into quickly and easily. Given the dependence on AI to filter out false alarms and to do things like detecting your packages being able to show them issues will help improve those in the future.

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The Video Doorbell Dual does have a speaker built-in as well as the microphone and the eufy app does give you a few ways to take advantage of this. If someone rings your doorbell you can reply to them and talk to them if you aren’t able to make it to the door or if it will be a second. But you can also set up auto-responses to ringing the doorbell. You can set this to a specific time frame and the first thing that came to mind for me is how my wife works third shift. For someone with a non-standard sleep schedule, you could set a time frame and ask people to come back at another time or you could set it to let them know you will be right there during the periods that you know you will be home. They have a few default responses but you can also record your own which you can use with that feature or use them as easy one-click responses manually as well.

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They do have some experimental options in the app like the familiar faces option which you can use to let you know exactly who is at the door. I have had this running and I thought for sure our mailman would pop up on here but so far he hasn’t so I don’t know how long it takes before this feature picks them up.

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Another area with a lot of experimental features would be the delivery guard section. This feature takes advantage of the package camera to pick up packages when they are delivered. Then there are options where you can have the Video Doorbell Dual play audio if anyone approaches any packages which might be enough to spook off a thief. You can get extra notifications of a package that you haven’t gone out and gotten yet, I bet parents would love this one to holler at their kids to go grab it. As far as my experience with the delivery guard feature as a whole. This has the potential to be a game changer and I think for a lot of people it will work great. But so far it hasn’t picked up packages but has picked up on sunlight on our steps. A big reason for this I think is the railing and everything in the way. It isn’t exactly an optimal setup for the Video Doorbell Dual to be able to pick them up but I am going to submit a few of these to eufy using the donate option to see if maybe they can find ways to improve on it for my situation.

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Being a doorbell, the chime is important as well and by default, the Video Doorbell Dual uses the homebase 2 as its chime. In addition to that, you get notifications on any phone that is attached to the account. There are 9 chime options with the homebase 2 as well as a silent option and this is an area I would love to see more options and maybe the option to be able to add your own chimes as well because I wasn’t a big fan of any of the default chimes. The homebase 2 chimes when turned up will sometimes sound slightly distorted as well. There are other chime options available. The app even has the option to use your wired chime but without a working wired chime, I wasn’t able to confirm if that worked. The FAQ on the eufy website specifically says that using the wired chime with the battery-powered doorbell doesn’t work but the app seems to tell a different story. They also support Amazon Alexa devices and can use those as a chime which if you already have multiple Alexa’s in your house is perfect. Google Nest supports this as well with their own doorbells but hasn’t opened it up to other doorbells yet which is a bummer because this would work for our setup. So hopefully that gets added in the future. Eufy also has an add-on chime setup that has a USB plug-in antenna that plugs into the homebase 2 and will let you add one or more of the eufy chimes which is what I’m going to need to do for our house in the future.

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