There's something I really should have thought about when I bought an outdoor security camera. I got a Reolink one — works fine most of the time, just like the indoor cameras — but during the winter it just stopped working. I think it was the temperature. I'm in Utah, so when it gets cold, the little battery that gets charged by the solar panel just can't hold a charge and stops working altogether. I didn't think about that. Even though I'm supposed to be an engineer. Yeah.
So I'm going to go home and try to reset it. It even lost its configuration — completely wiped — even though the sun's been out and the battery should have charged back up by now. It just didn't start working on its own. I remember having the exact same problem last winter and I should have fixed it then. Nope. Factory reset time, again.
After I get it back online, I need to actually find a more permanent solution. One option is a cold-resistant battery pack — there are some out there, but they're not cheap. The other option is to finally bite the bullet, make holes in my house, and wire up a proper camera with Power over Ethernet. No more battery problems, no more solar dependency.
That's actually the more appealing option at this point, because there's another downside to the solar cam I haven't mentioned: it doesn't continuously stream video. It saves power by only recording when it detects movement, which means if I want to see what's going on right now, I have to tap the app and wait for it to start streaming to my phone. It'd be so much nicer to just have a live view running on a screen somewhere — always on, always there. It still records on motion either way, but having a real-time feed would be a lot more useful.
Anyway, I'll sort it out this weekend. Maybe.