Home security cameras, who's using them? | GTAMotorcycle.com

Home security cameras, who's using them?

DJM

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Gang of punks trashed a couple of neighbours cars last night. We were unscathed because two were in the garage and I was working midnights with the other car. None of us have security cameras and I don't know the first thing about them. Any recommendations to cover front driveway and entrances would be appreciated. I'm not a skinflint, but something within reason to identify fkers like that.
 
We have 4 cameras on our house/property.

Plusses:
- You catch footage of **** happening on your property, like people messing with your cars, your neighbours dog crapping on your front lawn, people looking through your mail, etc.
- If someone damages something or claims to have hurt themselves on your property, you have footage of it.
- You can view your cameras remotely with most setups on your smartphone so you can keep tabs on things while you're away.
- You can stuff a massive hard drive in your recorder and have footage from 6-8 months back for no reason other than winding it back and watching yourself swimming in your pool in July, when it's actually December and you just shovelled the driveway. ;)

Cons:
- The footage you get may not be of any use as sometimes it's too dark, sometimes people camouflage themselves (bandana, or in our case one time, a baseball cap pulled down very low) if they see the cameras but want onto your property regardless.
- The police may not be really interested in the footage anyways unless it involves some bigger crime in the area vs your own personal smash and grab form your driveway.
- I constantly have to clean cobwebs off our cameras otherwise they screw up the motion triggering and I get 14 hours of flickering cobwebs on the system vs anything actually interesting that I might have wanted to see instead.

In general, I do love having our cameras, but in the end it ends up being simply for the remote viewing on my smartphone. It HAS caught a few people messing with our cars over the years, but the footage always ended up being of no use because it was too grainy, or the perps had their faces hidden (aforementioned baseball cap guy), or in one case...the police were simply not interested.

I do still like having them though. I currently have a Lorex wired system. Not a huge fan of them anymore as they are VERY slow updating their software - my system will soon be partially obsolete once iOS11 is released for the iPhone as their app is so old it won't work on the new OS. I've been nagging them for 6 months to update them but they don't seem to care - I guess when iOS11 drops and countless thousands of people find they suddenly can't view their cameras on their iPhones anymore they might pay attention when their tech support people are overwhelmed and people start dragging them through the mud online.
 
What resolution are the cameras that you have?
 
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I've been looking at different options as well, but I too, know squat about this.
@PrivatePilot, hardwired or wireless system?

sent from my Purple LGG4 on the GTAM app
 
What resolution are the cameras that you have?

They are not HD. I forget what they are exactly, 720 perhaps.

Subscribed.
I've been looking at different options as well, but I too, know squat about this.
@PrivatePilot, hardwired or wireless system?

sent from my Purple LGG4 on the GTAM app

Ours are wired. Wireless systems still need power so you need to run wires regardless. I hear there are some wireless systems out there now that say they don't need power wires, but I suspect they are battery powered in the end....and I was NOT interested in dealing with dead batteries every few weeks. I know they all claim that the batteries will last many months, but the reality is as I mentioned earlier, all it takes is a spider to build a web in front of the camera and trigger the recording hundreds of times a day instead of the 10-15 times a day benchmark they likely use for stating the battery life on those wireless cameras, and boom....you're replacing the batteries every week.

Here's one of my cameras right now, for example - I just cleaned the webs off it 2 weeks ago, and they're back. I'm not sure why spiders are attracted to security cameras (some say it's the IR light the ones with night-vision emit) but they sure love them.

securitycam.jpg


Speaking of IR, AFAIK none of the wireless/battery ones have a good night vision option as the IR would simply kill the batteries in no time flat.
 
I think wired would be preferable, with a hard drive to capture it all. Night vision capable, and maybe some sort of motion trigger to save data?

They absolutely trashed one car, keyed the side and bashed the front windshield in. Fairly new Dodge Charger Hemi something or other. It was parked on the street in front. Surprised no-one heard it, I didn't even notice the damage when I got home in the morning but then, I was half-asleep.
 
I have Rogers home security and they gave me a wireless cam. Works pretty good with good quality. It's pointed to driveway always. Made sure it's very visible so people know there are cameras. Also got the sign out front that says dog and Rogers home monitoring.

Nothing beats the dog though. Anyone comes near the house and all you hear is an excited dog... To everyone else it sounds like danger.

We also have outdoor pot lights which help visibility a lot. There is a lot of light and I don't think people want to mess around.

Maybe get some lights that activate with motion. Warn people away.
 
If you want something quick and dirty and super cheap as long as you have some old smart phones lying around.
Try out https://manything.com/.

Basically, install on smartphone, setup sensitive area and/or volume triggers so if something happens in it then trigger an alert via text or email. Can login and view from anywhere. If you get a subscription it will store video for you.

I works great, can easily monitor my dog around the house with the 2 that I have setup around the place. Making sure he doesn't go a barking tirade, if he has to go out, when the walker came by(so I know how soon I have to get home).
 
Nothing beats the dog though. Anyone comes near the house and all you hear is an excited dog... To everyone else it sounds like danger.


Don`t know anyone with a dog that has ever had a break in .
 
Don`t know anyone with a dog that has ever had a break in .
Imagine they did, though? That would be ruff.

sent from my Purple LGG4 on the GTAM app
 
k' nein to the break in then.....used to have a couple of German Shepards as a kid. One scared me(until I started feeding it), the other was a big chicken.
 
Don`t know anyone with a dog that has ever had a break in .

Our house in the country was robbed, two dogs in the house , in fairness they were Fox Terriers. Took booze, cash, jewelry and oddly never touched the guns. This was pre lock in a vault rules, they just stood in a rack in the family room.
 
Our house in the country was robbed, two dogs in the house , in fairness they were Fox Terriers. Took booze, cash, jewelry and oddly never touched the guns. This was pre lock in a vault rules, they just stood in a rack in the family room.


Sounds like someone that knew your house .
 
why mess around with all these expensive high tech crap, do it the old fashion way

get a watch dog.

DONE !!!
 
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Gang of punks trashed a couple of neighbours cars last night. We were unscathed because two were in the garage and I was working midnights with the other car. None of us have security cameras and I don't know the first thing about them. Any recommendations to cover front driveway and entrances would be appreciated. I'm not a skinflint, but something within reason to identify fkers like that.

Talk to my buddy Marlowe (That's his actual name and his name on GTAM), his day job is setting up security cameras and security equipment.

If he asks, tell him that I told you about him. Marlowe and I are old buddies and we ride often together, he will know who you are talking about.
 
The truth is is that if they really want your stuff, they'll get it.

I would imagine the absolute best option would be a monitored home alarm connected via cell signal. I would think it'd be a professional that could only get by that.

Next up might be a normal monitored home alarm system. I guess someone could bypass that by cutting power or phone lines maybe.

I laugh when people say dogs. That might scare away the average crack head or teenager. But I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to break a window and toss some food laced with poison or pills through. That would take care of your "alarm".

Sure you could pay a ton of money and maybe get an actual professionally trained guard dog, but no one is really going to do that for a normal home.


I did some stupid **** as a teenage. Let's just say my friends and I were looking for booze, cash, and quick stuff to sell. If saw an alarm sticker we kept walking. If we heard or saw a dog we kept walking. If we saw neighbours out and about or in windows we kept walking. But we weren't "targeting" any particular house, we were just looking for a house with no one home.
 
Our house in the country was robbed, two dogs in the house , in fairness they were Fox Terriers. Took booze, cash, jewelry and oddly never touched the guns. This was pre lock in a vault rules, they just stood in a rack in the family room.

No one is going to look for the other things... They will look for the guns.
 
Crimes of opportunity would outnumber targeted houses imo, for a large number of us. But anything you can do to lessen the possibility (alarm, dog, camera) is a plus for me.

sent from my Purple LGG4 on the GTAM app
 
Personally, the most satisfying thing I've ever used our cameras for was shaming a neighbourhood dog owner who let their horse-sized dog leave a massive pile of excrement on our boulevard one day. I found the offence on the security camera, printed out the picture of it happening (the dog is very easy to identify and unique to the neighborhoods) and then I pinned it up with a few choice words (along the lines of "thanks for letting your dog crap on peoples lawns without picking it up) on a bunch of the local mail superboxes. I'm sure we were not the only victim.

The problem seemed to get better with ALL dogs in the area after this.
 
I have a zmodo wireless camera setup to see what the kid's up to and a foscam wireless in the garage. Both work reasonably well. Both require power (zmodo needs USB, foscam uses a wall wart). You can quite easily get cameras with power over ethernet, but then you need to add the expense of a POE injection point and in most cases it becomes not worth the money. I have installed commercial systems using POE and ~$1000 IP cameras that worked quite well, but that is steep for a home system. I just chucked a bunch of wired cameras as it was starting to become more hassle than it was worth to tie them into a modern recording system.

For seeing what's happening, the zmodo sets up easier but I think it is worse for recording (you are locked into their ecosystem and can only save for 36 hours without paying monthly for cloud storage. boo). I don't record that one so I don't care.

The foscam is labeled indoor only, but has been in the unheated garage for years and still works perfectly. It records timelapse (1 picture/minute) as well as video on motion to an installed SD card. It also gets recorded onto a Synology NAS on motion trigger. Interface to view contents of SD card is clunky and slow, but you can always pull the card and pop it in a computer if you need the data. Camera setup is reasonably powerful, you can set specific areas for motion trigger to work or ignore, setup what scenarios trigger recordings, what resolution to capture etc. Mine has pan and tilt which can autoscan, but I doubt the camera would last long doing that and that would draw attention to the camera. Pan/tilt is helpful for setup to fine tune the fov without needing to keep remounting the base.

Trail cams can also work well for the right location if you just want still shots. I have seen people build them into birdhouses to monitor the gate into their back yard. Basically invisible and not much action so you won't have tons of pictures of passing cars.

How many cameras do you want to record? Synology allows 2 per NAS out of the box and requires purchase of additional licenses for more cameras. I use it because I have it for other reasons, but you have to be careful, doing things like motion detection on the NAS puts quite a load on the CPU.

If I decide to get another camera, it will be overlooking the driveway, likely another foscam (1080p) wireless mounted to the soffit (or potential through the soffit). This provides reasonable weather protection and keeps the electrical bits inside(ish).

IIRC Best buy sells a set of 4 truly wireless cameras (no power or data connection req'd) for $800. They supposedly last a year. Seems destined for failure to me, but I haven't personally played with them.
 

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