We have a long-term neighbor in a bad financial situation that has had increasingly sketchy people hanging around his house/sleeping over. There was at least one bust there. Cars have been broken into, fences jumped, one local break-in. Once someone slept in front of his house. We had a car outside rifled through but nothing taken. The neighbors are all aware and watching but that isn’t enough. I think an old lady neighbor probably calls the cops regularly. We are looking into adding a DIY outdoor surveillance and recording system, for deterrence and/or aggressive prosecution as needed. Installation will be very obvious and with possible signage.
Inside we have a very, ahem, alert Chow. A non-family member will enter over his dead body (our long term landscapers and pool guys have ended up on the fence more than once when he accidently got outside). But he isn’t a general barker. He snarls and growls aggressively only if he sees someone. Neighbor knows he is there, but his various “friends” coming and going would not and they are likely looking for easiest pickings. We already have motion lights.
I’ve read reviews on Amazon, etc. Looking at up to about $350, two wireless cameras (covered front and back porch), with wide views, and motion detected recording (prefer cloud or sd card). Easy use, easy set up. Nightvision. Smartphone notifications (and viewing?). Two way audio, battery-operated, a plus. Ideally a short recording start time or an adjustable one.
I don’t want a monitoring company. I feel that’s mostly for once they get inside–not for the creeping around outside. I really don’t want a $50/mo fee or a big cloud storage fee. I don’t think we need alarmed doors or windows. Our two main doors have attractive steel security doors on them. Windows have extra insert to keep them from sliding open. There are two French doors that have been reinforced and only one is really openable. Maybe, maybe, it needs a contact alarm?
Mostly I want to keep people away from the exterior by aggressively monitoring it (especially at first and audio would be great) and keeping them from getting to the interior. I’m sort of looking currently at: The Arlo system, Samsung smartcam pro, the Homemonitor system, Dropcam, Nest, Piper, and the Belkin.
Surely some CC members have gone this route before! I’d appreciate any feedback you have on those or other systems.
If there’s any way you could run the cable for the cameras instead of using wireless, I’d suggest you look at the sets on Costco in your price range that come with a dvr. If you’re not happy with the camera quality then it’s nice to know you can easily return the system to Costco. I also recommend a weatherproof sign (plastic signs for security cameras can be bought online for about $8 - $10.) You may want to post one in front and one in back.
We have one of the larger systems from Costco and it has paid for itself several times over. Local law enforcement was impressed with the image quality when we needed to provide them with a video clip. The dvr storage is more than sufficient for us.
agree with the Costo suggestion. they regularly have them on sale and they have a set of 8 cameras with the controller and all the wiring for $699 in my latest mailing. A bit more than you wanted to spend, but it will let you cover your property and garage well. No dummy cameras with this setup, they all work! You need one camera on the electrical box, for starters, so you record the crook smart enough to turn off the house power.
As for motion detect, that’s a good way to trigger the recordings and depending on the system you can have it email you with an image or notify you via an app. Don’t expect this to work very well though. At consumer price levels the image processing just isn’t that good compared to what they can put into a multi-thousand dollar system. So you’ll get alerts when shadows move, leaves blow thru, etc. Just about every notification is going to be a false one. You can specify parameters like the min number of pixels that change, duration to trigger, etc. but in the end I’ve found it doesn’t work all that great.
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Put your box in some non-obvious location in your house, although with your dog I think someone breaking in and stealing the box (with the video you captured) is somewhat remote.
Whatever you end up getting, I’d recommend IP instead of analog. The recording quality tends to be a bit better, and you’re also future proofing your wiring in a sense. Stringing those cables thru the attic or crawl space takes some time, and as IP cameras increase in resolution in the future you can just replace the cameras. Analog cameras could increase in quality but these days all the development is in digital imaging so its less likely future resolution will get higher for these. I would not recommend wireless cameras for the exterior. The image quality tends to be not as good as a hard-wired camera, and the camera needs to get power somehow anyway. The wireless cameras promise “up to” HD resolution and 30 frames/sec but that is going to be connection dependent, but the wired cameras easily and reliably hit this spec or better. The IP cameras send power down the IP cable so you just run 1 cable.
“You need one camera on the electrical box, for starters, so you record the crook smart enough to turn off the house power.”
Awesome suggestion. Or if you have a landline into which the home alarm system is tied, hide one camera to record anyone cutting the wires (phone and/or cable).
Great advice here, glad the Costco systems are good. We’ve been considering a wired system too. Might want to see if your neighborhood participates in the Nextdoor.com community web site. It’s a good way for neighbors to stay informed on local problems. The Ring doorbell camera has gotten generally favorable reviews but is limited to activity on your front porch. I’ve been using an app called Manything that allows you to use old iPhones to stream video through the window from inside. Quality is mediocre but it’s very inexpensive as a quick solution to watch what’s going on outside the house.
@momsquad@TempeMom, what did you decide to do? Our neighborhood has been experiencing a rash of break-ins and lots of “porch pirates”. Thinking about the Ring doorbell camera and some of their additional cameras, but our wireless is not dependable. DH is working crazy hours and not up for a big project involving running cable.
@yauponredux, we finally ditched the slow AT&T DSL and signed on with Charter/Spectrum. We get over 100mbps now (vs 2.5 with DSL) and it’s opened up a lot of opportunity. The first thing I did was increase the video quality on the manything app and I leave it on continuously now. Just yesterday I was supposed to receive a package delivery via OnTrac courier. The tracking email said they attempted delivery but no one was home. I reviewed video for the whole day and no delivery was attempted. Others have also complained that OnTrac records packages as delivered when in fact they were never even at the house. So it appears it is not just porch pirates we need to worry about.
I considered Ring but the reviews indicate that the motion sensing recording is too slow to activate. I still want to get a multi camera system with good night vision, continuous recording and remote access viewing with cloud storage. I plan to hire an electrician to install that and some motion activated lights. Hanging the Christmas lights is the closest my DH gets to electrical work.
I’ve got two wireless ARLO cameras. Free storage for 7 days. Totally wireless and battery powered. They work great and take about 2 seconds to install.
We ended up just getting the Ring. IDEAL for porch pirates.
It can be hooked up by long lasting battery or wired in—I wish we had wired it because then it would ring inside the house as well as the phone. Like the phone situation very much. Can see the kids coming and going etc. Can even talk to people via the ring from anywhere.
The way we have the unit installed it gives us about a 140 degree view…it would be 180 except for a wall we have. The truth is that our neighborhood situation seems less dire than I had imagined and we never ended up going further than that. We’ve had zero problems. We did buy the cloud storage for like $36/year.
@TempeMom do you always get a clip of the person as they are approaching the door? Some of the criticism in reviews is that the record on motion feature is slow to activate, so they get clips of people’s backside as they are leaving. I guess if someone stands there long enough it would not be an issue.
Yes. We have a sort of half-gate gated area (which sounds much fancier than it is) about 10-12 feet out from the door so maybe that creates more “delay” in their walking up/away. My guess is that you just miss the first 5 seconds or so.