When we were researching baby monitors, I kept coming to review sites that called the Nest cam the best option. And there could be nothing but the best for our first born baby! Said the crazy lady.

We received our Nest cam as a gift and it has been an awesome tool to keep an eye on Hudson, one that I’d highly recommend! But, it took us a little bit of figuring out how to best use it as a baby monitor, and to make it really work for us. Out of all of the reviews that I read, I couldn’t find anything that really addressed my #1 hesitation—how to use it for consistent monitoring of a baby versus as a safety/security tool that you would just use occasionally, which is what it’s designed for.

So, I thought I’d share our experience for anyone out there that also may be considering the Nest as a baby monitor.

*Note that we are an Apple family, so we’ve only used the Nest with iPhones and iPads, never an Android so I can’t speak to that.

The pros

• The picture is awesome. You can easily zoom in and out of different areas and maintain a good quality image, and when it’s bright daylight, the picture is crystal clear.
• The Nest’s night vision feature: the camera still works very well in pitch black conditions—a great feature as babies spend most of their lives asleep in at least semi-darkened rooms! I’ve seen other baby monitors where the night vision technically exists, but makes the picture really grainy.
• There isn’t a separate baby monitor receiver to keep track of, you just use the Nest app on your phone. My husband travels for work and wanted to be able to check in on Huds when he was away, so this was key for us and a major reason we went with the Nest. I love being able to check on Hudson when I’m at work or out to dinner with girlfriends—this is probably my favorite feature of using the Nest cam as a baby monitor.
• It’s easy to set up. You take it out of the box, place it where you want it, download the Nest app and it walks you through setting it up. I impressed my husband by getting ours mounted, up and running in under 5 minutes, so I’m blowing my cover here—it was pretty much idiot-proof.
• Major babysitter piece of mind. I fully admit my new-mom crazy, and for our first date with a non-family babysitter I warned her that I might check in on Hudson using the camera. We had a full, clear view of the room and I was able to enjoy my night out seeing him snoozing peacefully in his crib.
• You can talk into it! I actually haven’t found a practical use for this feature yet, but I am all about scaring our cat.
• The camera runs on wifi. I read that in a bunch of reviews and didn’t totally wrap my pregnant, tired brain around what that means and why it’s listed as a positive in most reviews. But never fear, I get it now: the alternative is that video baby monitors will transmit the picture using BlueTooth or a connection other than your wireless internet. By tapping into your home network, you’re able to get the fastest speeds of data transfer, which allows for the crystal clear picture I mentioned above and real-time monitoring. Using your home internet connection is also what allows you to pull up the Nest cam on your phone and watch your precious little bundle of joy snooze (or not) from anywhere in the world—BlueTooth can’t do that. There’s a BUT here, which I’ll address below.

The cons

• My primary complaint: with an iPhone or iPad, you can’t let the Nest app run in the background and still alert you to movement or sound. Not effectively, anyway. For me, this is the biggest downfall of using the Nest cam as a baby monitor. There is an alert feature that pops up saying, “Your camera spotted some activity!” and from there you can open up the Nest app to see what’s going on, but it’s a standard notification “ding” noise on the iPhone that can’t be changed. I can’t imagine the little notification noise waking up ANY sleep deprived new parents out there.
  This really freaked me out in the early days when we transitioned him from our room to his crib: I wanted to know when he was awake or crying, and I was counting on the Nest cam to do that for me. It really is not designed to do that, and a few times I’d wake up to find that my son had been crying for a while and I didn’t hear him or notice the notification. In retrospect, babies cry ALL the time and he’s totally fine. But waking up to him hysterically crying and not knowing how long he’d been trying to get our attention totally broke my hormonal new-mom heart.
• If you have the app up and running, it’s the equivalent of your phone running a live video for extended periods of time–in other words, it’s a major battery drain. If I’m not plugged in, I don’t have more than a few hours before my iPhone or iPad dies if I have the Nest feed up and running.
  If I plug my phone or iPad in to a charger and prop it up next to my bed like I did in the early days, I find it gets very hot after a few hours. I don’t know the exact repercussions of your iPhone overheating often, but I know it can’t be good!
  Also, there are some iPhone/iPad alerts (like low battery) that will kick you out of the app or freeze the live feed until you dismiss the alert. This means that you may have it running as a live feed from your phone or iPad so that you can monitor audio and video, but you may wake up to find that the Nest feed is not up so you may have missed your baby crying or making noise.
• There’s a small light on the Nest cam. It’s always on: green to indicate it’s up and running, red if the camera can’t find a connection to the internet, and it slowly blinks green if someone is watching live (which is actually a positive feature!) But, if it’s nighttime, even one tiny notification light can be pretty bright in a pitch-black room. Babies are mesmerized by lights, and we often will check the camera to find my son staring directly at it, which is hilarious and slightly creepy. Our doctor would say that any light in the room detracts from good sleep sleep, even a tiny notification light. I don’t think it’s all that serious, but it’s a factor.
• Because the camera runs on your home internet connection, if your wireless is down, you’re totally unable to use the Nest cam. The Nest is great about sending alerts letting you know the wireless network is down so the camera can’t operate, which I appreciate. But when it’s the only way to monitor your baby, this can be problematic if you have a troublesome Internet provider or a less than stellar connection. (**CoughCoughCOMCASTCoughCough.)
• Short of giving other caregivers a live-feed into one of the rooms of your house by installing the app on their phone and giving them access to your camera, there’s no way a babysitter or family members can use the Nest cam when they’re watching your baby. My husband and I often say that Nest should set up levels of camera permissions that the primary users could control—like setting hours of camera viewing per secondary user. But as the Nest is not designed to be a baby monitor first, this just doesn’t exist. It’s all or nothin’!

A few tips for using the Nest camera as a baby monitor:

• Pair the Nest cam with an old-school audio monitor. This addresses a bunch of issues: it allows you to monitor for audio without running the battery-draining app consistently or depending on the tiny alert noise to notify you that you should check in on the camera. We use the audio monitor at night now, and when we’re awakened to him crying will pull up the Nest to gauge the situation and how quickly we want to go in.
• Mount the camera up high, pointing down. We like this eye-in-the-sky mode of using the Nest cam because the camera’s fish-eye lens will allow you to see the whole room, and then you can zoom in on the crib when your baby is sleeping. Ours is in a weird corner that I never thought would work when mounting it, but it does, and I can’t believe I have such a great view of the whole room.
• Use a powerful 3M sticky strip to attach the mounting plate to the wall instead of drilling it in. We’ve already moved the camera a few times, and as my son gets older we’ll likely move it again to keep the cord out of reach. There’s no holes to show for any of this, and the camera is easily light enough for the 3M tabs to hold it up securely.
• You can set up an old iPad or iPhone with the Nest app (and delete everything else) to basically be a monitor only—helpful if you want to run it plugged in like a live feed. I know my husband and I have a hard time keeping off of our phones for even ten minutes so this could be an option that gives us the best of both worlds! This would also be a great way to give a babysitter access to the camera without giving them full time access on their own phone. We don’t have this set up because we’ve found that the audio monitor works sufficiently to alert us or caregivers when he needs attention, though if we had learned about this tip in earlier days I likely would have done it when he was a newborn.

Cheers, friends! Hope this was helpful to another information-saturated mom-to-be out there. Any tips that I missed?