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Home Surveillance and Security - Do you have it?

ddeuce22

ddeuce22

Professional
So last Sunday I finally got around to installing my CCTV system in my home. (With the help of 2 friends/co-workers)

I had been sitting on the equipment for a bit now but it was just too damn hot to be crawling around in an attic in the middle of one of the hottest Texas summers in awhile. We live in a pretty good middle to upper middle-ish neighborhood, but the amount of targeted crime and theft in our subdivision lately is staggering considering how far north we moved to get away from Austin and all the crap down there.

Recently, 4 houses down from mine on the same side of the street there was a break-in and attempted abduction of a young girl. Cops never caught the guy, and I felt really dumb having a complete CCTV system sitting in my closet when the cops knocked on my door asking if I had cameras and could I share any footage. Needless to say this was what pushed me to do it. I noticed that while plenty of homes in the neighborhood have cameras, not many on my block do. Or even the adjacent ones.

Wondering how many here have a system in their home, and how long have you had it for? Did you find it to be comforting or provide you better peace of mind, or just another thing to obsess about? Having had it in for a few days now i'm..... unsure how I feel about it. It's great to have the visibility, but I find myself constantly viewing them.
 
not me, not yet, but if i do this, i want day/night vision cameras and all wireless.

and i'll pay a professional security company for all of it.

at my age, i ain't climbing no ladders, or huff and puff to do it myself.

i don't care where anyone lives, neither do the criminals.

there are "gangs of organized thugs", that go from one city to another, from one state to another.
 
After having something I ordered stolen from my apartment front door I installed 4 cameras, they only record during movement identified and the recording is clear enough to identify the individual. I have an app on my phone and I turn on notifications when a camera is activated so when I’m not home I know who’s doing what at both my front door and patio door.
There are also two cameras inside my apartment in case someone breaks in.
Not a real expensive system but it does what I need it to do.
When I’m home and someone knocks on the front door I can quickly open the app and see who is there as it gives me a totally better view then using the peep hole in the door.
This is the front door view.
0176A193-4E9F-49E9-89A5-BF47CCB7B7C9.jpeg

The door on the left is my neighbors.
You can also see stairs on the left and right and the camera picks up movement before the individual shows up in the camera view.
This is the patio door view.
6CBE8D50-3953-4755-9694-1FB565498AD7.jpeg

Although I live on the second floor and someone would need a ladder to gain access to my patio I like the idea of seeing that door because you never know. The cameras can see in the dark very well as you can see that pick is taken at night.
 
I also have a home alarm for inside the house and cameras for outside the house. They are completely different systems. The thing about the cameras is that if internet goes out no camera. Its cheap to buy but would like different system but expensive to installed by professionals and I am too old to be climbing around in the attic. Also usually the thieves around here do not care id they are being recored on cameras. That tells me judges here don't do anything if caught.
 
nmedge said:
I also have a home alarm for inside the house and cameras for outside the house. They are completely different systems. The thing about the cameras is that if internet goes out no camera. Its cheap to buy but would like different system but expensive to installed by professionals and I am too old to be climbing around in the attic. Also usually the thieves around here do not care id they are being recored on cameras. That tells me judges here don't do anything if caught.
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I wanted a WiFi system but they were to darn expensive and are unreliable as you mentioned so I went with hardwire.
Yes the wires can be cut but only after the video is secured in the recorder.
The system did get me a modest discount on apartment insurance and it ensures instant payment on a claim if a break in occurs. The apartment also has a built in alarm system and the siren is extremely loud
“don’t ask me how I know”
but like car alarms most people ignore them.
 
ddeuce22 said:
So last Sunday I finally got around to installing my CCTV system in my home. (With the help of 2 friends/co-workers)

I had been sitting on the equipment for a bit now but it was just too damn hot to be crawling around in an attic in the middle of one of the hottest Texas summers in awhile. We live in a pretty good middle to upper middle-ish neighborhood, but the amount of targeted crime and theft in our subdivision lately is staggering considering how far north we moved to get away from Austin and all the crap down there.

Recently, 4 houses down from mine on the same side of the street there was a break-in and attempted abduction of a young girl. Cops never caught the guy, and I felt really dumb having a complete CCTV system sitting in my closet when the cops knocked on my door asking if I had cameras and could I share any footage. Needless to say this was what pushed me to do it. I noticed that while plenty of homes in the neighborhood have cameras, not many on my block do. Or even the adjacent ones.

Wondering how many here have a system in their home, and how long have you had it for? Did you find it to be comforting or provide you better peace of mind, or just another thing to obsess about? Having had it in for a few days now i'm..... unsure how I feel about it. It's great to have the visibility, but I find myself constantly viewing them.
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CCTV is the way to go. Any system that involves internet storage or connection or wifi is very vulnerable. Not to mention the fact that wireless cameras are nowhere near as technologically advanced as hardwired cameras. The zoom on wireless cams sucks.
 
Yes , we have Vivent. We paid for the equipment, they came and
Installed it , we also pay a monthly monitoring fee. Automatic alerts to local LEO if intrusion is detected.
This summer we had left to run to the grocery store. My wife had left some of her clothing items on a wood drying rack with a fan on it in the office where the gun safe is stored.
We have multiple sensors in that room and the motion of the clothing moving set off the alarm and not 5 minutes later we had a cop in our driveway. He had beat us back to our home. Man, That was embarrassing, but we are thankful they responded quickly.
In short for , us it’s worth it.
 
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I have cameras inside and out. I have both PoE (Power over ethernet), as well as wifi with local and cloud storage for both outside and inside. I bought little solar panels to keep the batteries charged on the wifi ones. 6 months and they are still at 100%
 
I use a SimpliSafe home security system. Works great and easy to install yourself.
I also have several Arlo cameras for recording the activity around the house and several Wyze cameras for watching the dog when we are away as well as other parts of the house.
 
Hammer67 said:
I won't install any surveillance system that involves a cloud-based subscription service, e.g. "Ring"

I rely on analog solutions.
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If it can be defeated by disabling your electric or internet connection it is a compromise that may or may not be appropriate I suppose. It depends on what you're trying to protect and who you are trying to protect it from.
 
Bassbob said:
If it can be defeated by disabling your electric or internet connection it is a compromise that may or may not be appropriate I suppose. It depends on what you're trying to protect and who you are trying to protect it from.
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That's one of the concerns, and not an insignificant one. In the event of an extended power outage, and if you don't have power backup, for example. But there are other concerns with those systems as well, like the security of your information/privacy.
 
Agree with the security concerns. The power over internet system goes right to its own hard drives. Thats locked down, no issue there. The wifi system can record to its own internals, but I have cloud storage to access from the web (convenience). With those, the outside ones I put on at night when we are not out in the yard. The inside ones, I only use if no one is home. Those are connected to "smart" outlets, so they don't even have power unless I turn those on first.
 
I can't pretend to understand it all. My wife, among other things, is a degreed computer ( mac and Linux) programmer and a hacker level geek. All I know for sure is we have our own network that is independent of the internet completely, There are many reasons not to have your video feeds go through the internet. It's bad enough we have devices that run over wifi from one house to the other, but those are just Alexa type devices that are primarily for us to communicate between the two. The house next door I just bought primarily for storage, but the lady I bought it from was forced to move back to S. Dakota. She lived in a house on the other side of that one and she had to just abandon it as her husband died of covid and left her flat broke and with some debt. She also abandoned an indoor/outdoor cat which I promised to look after and who now lives in the house I bought. So Junior the cat has his own house at this point and my wife, bless her heart, has set up Echos or dots or whatever so we can keep an eye on him. :ROFLMAO: She also has devices to shoot internet signal over to Junior's house and one that shoots it over to an elderly neighbor across the street who can't afford internet.

Anyway, at this point Junior's house is monitored by cheap, wifi cams and devices, but the house I live in is not. This one is hardwired with it's own drives and power supplies and backups. Pro Tip: Put your control center for these devices somewhere they can't be found easily.

Another reason not to have video stored in the cloud is, well, there could be times when you don't want video being shot that can be accessed or deleted by anyone other than yourself.
 
Unfortunately, most things today can be hacked. It's really just a matter of how badly they want the information. Thats the world we live in. I go into it with that thought in mind. Even though I secure it to the best of my ability, there is always someone out there smarter than I am. I just don't point things in an area I don't want people to see. If I have to if a "general" area, its only supplied power and is on at a time of my choosing. (no one home) If they want to get all hot and bothered looking at a video of my back door hanging on the house, have at it.
 
jmcd said:
Unfortunately, most things today can be hacked. It's really just a matter of how badly they want the information. Thats the world we live in. I go into it with that thought in mind. Even though I secure it to the best of my ability, there is always someone out there smarter than I am. I just don't point things in an area I don't want people to see. If I have to if a "general" area, its only supplied power and is on at a time of my choosing. (no one home) If they want to get all hot and bothered looking at a video of my back door hanging on the house, have at it.
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You can't hack it if it's hardwired. And more important than someone seeing your routine day to day activities at your house, might possibly be something you are forced to do in defense of yourself and your family. YOU want to be in complete control of any video of that I would think.
 
Man, I started this thread and then went away for a few days on vacation, almost forgot about it. I meant to respond sooner but I was being yelled at to get my ass out of the house before we miss our flight. Love seeing all the responses!!

There is nothing wrong with companies like Vivint or Simplisafe, and honestly it's a great way to go for home systems. Wireless is ALOT easier, if you are in a multi-level home it's almost your only option depending on home construction and/or budget.

A cheaper and better way to do it is to go through alarm.com also. Those aforementioned companies are just selling you alarm.com products and monitoring anyways, they just act as middleman/installer.

My system is not cloud based, I think it's a bit too vulnerable for my liking. I've got my own network with a 12TB ExacqVision Enterprise NVR. 6 cameras for a total of 12 views. All POE+ via CAT6. I record and store 90 days of video across all 12 views before the my drives start to record over the oldest content.

The last 2 frames are just throw away views unfortunately as the camera is a 4-Head panoramic that only adjusts left to right, so it catches the front/side of the house, and the gate to the backyard. I tried to just snip a screenshot from my software but the resolution was too high so the picture was above the size limit for the forums, so I took a quick pic of the monitor itself with my phone lol. All cameras at the front of the house are true day/night as well as IR.

The black square you see in one of the views is my neighbors window. I was still setting up some things on my cams when I took this originally, but that's a privacy effect you can add so that you are not recording your neighbors windows, which is technically illegal. At the point this pic was taken, I was still working on fixing the other view to block that window.


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