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I recently purchased an Infant Optics DXR 8 video monitor and it works well in my basement with LO sleeping on the second floor. It isn't cheap, but we're reasonably happy with it.

@agold: We have a two story house witj basement, and OH frequently works in his workshop in the basement while DD is asleep on the second floor. Our monitor is this:
http://www.target.com/p/vtech-safe-sound-174-dm221-digital-audio-baby-monitor-with-1-000-feet-of-range-night-light-talk-back-intercom/-/A-13929545

It even works when I am outside at the basement level shoveling snow.

ETA: Just saw you wanted video. Oops. Well, it is a great little monitor if you can live without video.

Our Motorola one works throughout our house. I was just using it in the basement with my preschooler while my babe slept upstairs on the second floor. It also works if we go outside. We have plaster walls and brick, and our wifi gives us hell, but the monitor works well!

We bought the one Rocker2014 mentioned. It didn't work well in our house at all. We even lose the signal in the next room sometimes. After a lot of research and experimenting, it seems the reason is interference from wifi signals. We live in a townhouse and have to contend with not only our own wifi and extenders but the ones belonging to our neighbors as well (obviously we have no control over those). The solution is apparently to buy a DECT monitor since they use a different frequency, however, they are only available without video.

I'm super bummed because we bought the monitor from Amazon months in advance of baby and now it's way too late to return it. So I have a very expensive and useless monitor.

@agold: Occasionally, but it's pretty rare. In advance of purchasing the monitor I had heard that it was important to keep it 3ish feet away from wifi devices, and when the signal goes out I just have to move it a little further away from my phone and it is fine. This happens maybe once per month to us, at most. We actually have two wifi signals in our house (stupid cable provider bundles!) and are in range of 3 or 4 of our neighbor's signals but it hasn't impacted the monitor at all.

FYI, we had two other video monitors before this one and it the wifi interference worse with both of those (a Motorola that was crap and never worked well and a Foscam that I loved but is no longer manufactured that died due to a battery charging issue).

A good friend of mine has a summer infant one that she loves in their 1000 square foot apartment, but it is pretty much useless past that distance.

Honestly, I feel like video monitors are always a bit of give and take. When I had to replace my Foscam, I was ready to pay anything to get what I wanted in a monitor (odd house setup that I can't hear LO from my bedroom even if she's screaming) and after days of research I couldn't find a monitor I really felt great about. I finally decided on the Infant Optics, and it's been good for me. But, there seems to be no consistency in any of the brands/models, which makes no sense to me. Each monitor had reviews that indicated that the item simply didn't work as advertised, like @Iced Tea: experienced. My best recommendation is to buy a monitor from Amazon Prime or somewhere with an equally good return policy and see if it works for you and be ready to return something that doesn't. Not an optimum situation, but it's the best advice I can offer.

Oh, and I should mention that I plug in the monitor every night right next to two cell phones and a kindle without issue.

And you're welcome, I completely understand your situation - I was in the same boat a few mos ago. Good luck!

We have the Samsung video monitor (have had it about 3.5 years) and it gets a good distance, it works well in our house on all levels and in my parents larger house on different levels (you can check the distance ranges on them)... it's been great!

We just do an audio monitor when we're traveling. I know it's easy to get reliant on video, but we realized the audio let us know if they were awake.

And we have an owlet too. You just have to put it in their room and if it goes off you should be able to hear it over the monitor. We've stopped using ours though because she's standing and I felt like it was messing with her balance.

I have this one, and take it with me when we travel. We have a similar situation at my parents house: we sleep in the finished basement, so F goes to bed down there before us and we hang out with family on the main floor. We've never had an issue with it working.

No specific recommendations but we have 3 floors in our home and we've had 3 different brands of monitors over the years, and we've never had a problem with them.

We did have a slight issue with wifi interference with one of them, but I think I solved it by moving most of our streaming stuff to our 5 ghz wifi (and the monitor uses 2.4 ghz).

We have a vtech basic monitor and one of the summer time video monitors. We can use both in our 3 story house. The kids sleep upstairs and we can be in the basement or outside and they're both finw

@agold: This is different from the other suggestions, so I don't know if this is what you're looking for or not. You said you didn't want to be wifi-dependent, but...

When I was visiting family, I didn't want to buy a whole thing for the visit alone but still needed a video monitor. So I downloaded the ManyThing app on our old iPad and my iPhone. It's free and it has video and audio for free. Super super easy to set up. I think there are a few other similar apps out there. We just propped up the iPad so we could see the side of the PnP. The only bad thing is that there was no night vision, and even with the nightlight on, it was totally black. But naps worked out well. For me, it was worth the (lack of) cost. But if you are okay with paying, then maybe a legit baby video monitor with night vision would be best! Good luck!

@agold: We have that V-Tech as our backup monitor and it does work great! We must have the same priorities, lol! Glad you got something that feels right to you!