I bought 2 Vanguard cameras and they worked great so I bought 12 more. Mostly the sat in their boxes for a couple years before I got around to installing them. 1 year after that, all 14 are broken from VERY little use. After opening them, I found every one of them had the same problem. There are 2 small plastic gears that are used for the pan and tilt functions and they are all cracked. Every one of them. They didn't all crack at once. At first I started swapping out broken gears with the cams that had good gears so that I would have at least some working cams but soon after, they were all cracked.
X10 support only told me, since my cams are out of warranty, they don't service them, sell replacement parts, or could tell me where to get replacement parts, my only offered option was to buy replacements. When I spend over $15,000 overall on X10 equipment, I expect a little bit more than "tough luck". I paid $600 each for the cameras and the rest was spent on other X10 equipment. The low price was the reason for buying. I didn't buy expecting cheap equipment for a cheap price, I expected great equipment for a cheap price. That was what was advertised after all.
I don't expect them to replace my cameras. But I do expect at the very least, tell me where I can get the gears elsewhere. This is because this has been an ongoing problem with these cams for lots and lots of customers which I note after reading the forums.
What I want is, can anybody tell me specifically, where to buy the replacement gears. A web site and part number would be nice. Imagine how many customers would go from mad to glad if X10 could simply have this information to give to customers in a similar predicament. I really don't want to buy 14 more cameras and them swap them with the bad cameras and return them. This is because I know those too will eventually have the same problem. I want a fix, not a refund or temporary solution.
Regarding the quality of x10 products in general, I found that everything can be made to work as advertised except for the wireless video transmission, which is really not good enough for use with multiple cameras in a typical home even if it is cheap. The reason is that while you may be able to get 1 or 2 positioned just right, getting the receiver antenna positioned just right to be able to clearly receive a wireless video signal from 8 different camera locations is unlikely. Another problem is neighbors. I have several neighbors that apparently also have x10 wireless cams. Not only do their signals interfere with mine, there is nothing to prevent them from receiving my signals or controlling any of my wireless equipment. As a wired solution, the equipment works satisfactory except for the broken plastic gears.
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Topic: Broken plastic gears on Vanguard Cameras, using multiple wireless cams (Read 30119 times)