Is there a work around for this? I contacted Eufy support six months ago and after the diagnosis they recognized it as a defect but is there a way to find out when it will be fixed?
Here is the step by step, I am using HB2 with battery Cam2 and Cam2C with the app on Android but I do not believe the hardware is relevant.
(1) I am located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida USA, Eastern time zone. My phone is set to Eastern time zone, same as the initial setup on the HB2. Everything was working, motion detection, notification, video captures etc…
(2) I flew to Hong Kong, where the time difference is 12 hours. In other words, while in Hong Kong, where the phone is at noon, at home the HB2 is at midnight.
(3) Let’s say on May 1, 2025 at 7am at home a motion is detected and a video is captured. I got a notification on my phone there is a motion event, I opened up the app and go to Events and I can see a video clip of that motion event, not a problem because at home it is 7am on May 1, and in Hong Kong it is 7pm on May 1 the same day.
(4) Now later on that day at home at 2pm another motion is detected and a video is captured. I got a notification on my phone that motion is detected, I go to Events and there is nothing. This is because in Hong Kong the time is now 2am on May 2, the next day. If you go to May 1 pretending it’s the day before the video is not there, if you go to May 2 the local time the video is not there either. Yet the video has been captured and recorded because I can exit the Eufy app and go back to the Android notification and view the video via the thumb nail link that way. It appears that whenever the date of the phone (local time) and the date of the devices at home are different, the app won’t list the events or videos because it got confused.
(5) In my case it happens a lot since this time difference of 12 hours is so drastic. If you have a smaller time difference say between California and New York of three hours, you can have the same issue if the devices are at 11pm Pacific time zone and motion is detected but you are with your phone in New York which is 2am the next day, you will receive notifications but the events will not be listed on yesterday or today no matter how you configure your filters.
Is there a way to tell when this defect will be resolved as I have another trip coming up to go to Singapore.
The core of the issue seems to be that the Eufy app uses your phone’s local time to display events, rather than the time zone of your HomeBase or cameras. This mismatch can cause events to appear missing or be difficult to locate when you’re traveling.
Eufy mentioned a fix coming but I guess it hasn’t come yet since you still experience it.
They did mention a workaround is to set your phone time to the same time as the HB when viewing videos.
Unfortunately there is no way to know when Eufy plans to fix bugs. They wont give ETAs on them.
Best practice when developing is to always store time as UTC and then adapt to the local time be it on the camera or the mobile phone. I suspect this wasn’t done and now needs to be retrofitted. For me travelling from the UK to Europe at +1 or +2 hours is a bit annoying as the order of the events is out with some cameras correct and others out by +1 or +2.
Interesting. I was not aware of this. And I think it might explain some issues I’ve had with missing videos, notifications etc. I would think the HB380 would dictate both the time of the event and the notification time would be set by that, with your phone reflecting the time zone difference only on its own system. (I.e. app and event still based on home time zone as registered by HB3 time setting.)
I assume an archive of all videos from the travel period would export any events that you are unable to access in the app due to the time mismatch? Have you tried that? I know it’s not the most efficient way, and defeats the point of the system…
What if you set your homebase and/or cameras to your travel time zone while you are there? Would that solve it? Or maybe create other problems…?
I am not sure this is an issue with the storage of the events. I myself also in the software development profession and cannot imagine not storing events not in a normalized date/time convention such as UTC.
In my way of thinking, this is a display issue. The videos are there, but if you go to Events, it is listed by a date such as May 1, 2025 which is local time. There is a list of filters such as by event type, detection type, devices etc…but the date is hard coded. If it had allowed the user to turn off the date, I bet the missing events will be there. What it got confused by is when you say show me events of May 2, you are saying show me all events occurred on May 2 on my local phone, which I think at that time did a query of May 2 midnight to May 3 midnight of the local phone against the home base events and nothing came up, somewhere there it is not normalizing the two time zones to the same base like UTC. Regardless it is a defect.
I did look up related topics and it seems this has been known for years going back as far as 2020. So it is still pending a fix.
Changing my phone while traveling to keep the home time instead of adjusting automatically to local time has the side effect of messing up my calendar. It means while traveling if in Singapore someone says let’s meet at 2pm tomorrow I would have to mentally recalibrate the meeting time to home time, it will be a bigger inconvenience than having eufy out of synch.
Another thought: what if you override your phone’s auto date and time setting and auto time zone and keep it set to local FLL time. I mean, with a 12 hour difference that’s a pretty obvious mental calculation that you don’t really even have to think about. Perhaps that would be the easiest workaround to ensure you can easily access recordings and not miss or lose any events or notifications…
to keep everything in local time in FLL will be for me very troublesome because I don’t just use the phone to look up the time, I also use it to manage task deadlines and set appointments. So if I am meeting the dentist at 2pm on Tuesday I have to remind myself to enter that into the calendar as 2am on Tuesday or the alert will not be pushed at the appropriate time. To set an alarm to wake me up the next morning at 7am, I have to again remind myself no set it for 7pm the previous evening. I have to constantly recalibrate for everything else which is not practical.
On top of that, this 12 hour difference is only part of the year as they do not observe daylight savings time so the rest of the year is 11 hours. My next trip is to Singapore and Bankok and that is also 12 and 11 hours time difference.
I don’t mind waiting for a software fix but if this has been a known issue reported by others going back 2020 2021 and still an issue today does it mean it will not be fixed?
just thought about it some more, what about the reverse?
Before my departure to Singapore, is there a way to set my HB’s time zone to Singapore time so that it will be in synch with my phone once I landed. If I am there 3 weeks I am in synch for that three weeks. If I go to Bankok it is one hour time difference so the lost video issue should happen less frequently. When I come home I set the time back to EST/DST on the homebase. All that I lost will be the videos captured day of departure and day or return.
I suppose you could do that… Go into the settings of the HB3, click on General and then time zone and select the time zone you want and click save.
The only thing I don’t know is.. will the cameras that are connected to the HB3, will their time stamp change or must you go into each cameras time zone and change them individually?
