buellwinkle

You can pay electrician rates, but you are responsible for the camera location, pointing, focusing, configuration of the cameras and configuration of the NVR. That's the best way to go if you know what you want, where you want it and know how to configure it all which is most people on this forum. When you pay a premium for a security company, you are paying for their knowledge, skills, experience & warranty but you don't always get your money's worth.

We got a bid for 4 analog cameras and a 4 channel DVR, $10K, so $17k for 7 cameras and DVR is not out of the ordinary and having people that know what they are doing is a challenge. How about 2 people onsite for an entire week trying to figure out how to get an electric strike to work and this company came highly recomended, does the local toll road cameras so they say. Then finally got this $500 electic strike to work but used cheap screws to hold it in and in 3 days, it broke off. They put a backup battery in place, but never connected it and threw the wires away. They put two circuit boards in metal cabinet but never attached it to the back, within a few months they sagged and touched.

The cheapest lens I got for a box camera cost me $110 for a varifocal lens. You get what you pay for and decent lens can cost several hundred.

What will be your pain when the camera say goes bad after a year or two, who will service the camera? Have a friend who's $3,000 Axis camera was taken out by lightening and a month later, Sandy took out a $4,000 Axis camera, both replaced within a week by Axis. When I have problem with my ACTi camera, I drive over to the offices, drop it off, sometimes they fix it same day. Dahua is pot luck. They publicly said they won't support or warranty cameras sold in the U.S. under the Dahua name, so you are likely buying from someone getting them gray market in another country and the only support you get is what the reseller knows.

Depends what you call Enterprise. Installing 3 camera at a homeowner's association pool (not where I live), is that "Enterprise". We got bids as low as $7,500 up to $25K. 3 Mobotix cameras, $1,599 list for the most expensive one, $999 for the least and NAS for $150 and a PoE switch for $70. So say $3,500 in parts at wholesale, you do the rest of the math. BTW, we chose low bid, after the install, we never saw that guy again, dissapeared off the face of the earth but for $25K we MAY have gotten better service. The community was lucky they had me to fix things they misconfigured. For example, they had a 1TB NAS but limited recordings to 5GB per camera, so that held less than 1 day of video. Found out when someone threw a chair through the clubhouse window only to find we couldn't go back to yesterday. Probably an easier install than what you describe in someone's home where you have to crawl through rat infested attics with fiberglass insulation and 20 years of dust, be at the picky homeowner's whim, install Dahua which you will be liable for providing support but you won't get the support you need. What if a camera breaks? Are you going to provide good service and replace within a few days? What's the repair turnaround from your camera supplier? Now if you just want to hire an electrician to run Ethernet and mount the cameras to the wall, you can get that from $100-$200 per run. That's not the same as aiming/focusing camera, configuring the NVR and each camera, testing, service and support for the warranty period. Also, what's your expertise worth?

I understand why brands like Dahua are tops on your mind, it's presumed to be cheap. But here's my take on it. You will get a 3MP camera and at best you'll be able to use it to stream VGA (640x480) on your city's website and likely 1/4th that like 320x240. You can go a little higher if you want to just take stills on demand or just FTP a still image every few minutes but 3MP is more than most people will wait for to come up on their laptops on a public web page. I would not even go over 800x600 for stills. Remember, people use the internet in public places or at work where speeds are not that great. Also, does the city want to have images that large taking up that much space on their web pages? I just finished an article on how to embed video on a website if interested, it's on my blog. Stills are easier but boring. So what I would recomend is lower end Axis camera, an M series. They do this sort of thing best with lots of documentation on their website. Sure, you'll pay as much for a VGA or 800x600 camera than what a 3MP Dahua costs, but you don't need the resolution and I'll take a camera made in Sweden by the #1 network cameras manufacturer with top level support than a camera made in mainland China with no U.S. support. That's my first choice. My second choice is ACTi, made in Taiwan but supported by their office in the U.S., good support, good prices on cameras, not that much more than Dahua. You can probably get their 1MP outdoor cameras for under $200 like their D31. They also have good documention and support. Just my 2 cents.

Here's the problem. Sure, I can find small outfits with a few people but we've done that, what you get is a dependency on one guy that's good, and his helpers that can barely point the camera, that one guy leaves and it's over. So we try and use larger outfits that have several trucks, crews and can come out service our security with access control and network cameras in a timely basis. Honestly, I spend more time getting these guys to setup the cameras and access control correctly than I would if I do it myself. Even with basics like setting the camera time, setting the OSD to the location name instead of the default brand name, setting proper motion detect zones is beyond many techs. Imagine one tech spent over a month just trying to configure a few cameras, onsite every day and still the basics were not done, even focusing and aiming not done in that time. While I could fix it myself, I have to get them to come out and experience their mistakes first hand so the next project goes better. You don't know how many times I feel like just getting the cameras wholesale, get an electrician to run Ethernet and mount the cameras and donate my time and configure everything but then I'm stuck maintaining it. If you think it's easy finding competent people that work for less then please find them for me here in So Cal, really, new projects coming up soon. Has to be knowledgeable with HID Global access control systems, Doorking dialers and Mobotix & Axis cameras.

We pay about $1,500/camera above and beyond camera parts costs to run wiring, configure the cameras. The least we paid was about $1,000/cam and that was a very low bid. We've had people bid much higher too. This is is on top of any construction charges, for example, running conduit, installing poles, electrical, external nema boxes, trenching.

Also, avoid using home PC's for this and to me what you've chosen seems like a consumer PC. Consider and HP DL380 server, 2U tall, can hold 16 or 26 drives, dual xeon where you can get 16 or 20 cores. Then you can run less effecient software like Milestone without a problem. If you want to stay 3rd party and not go with camera vendor's software there's plenty of choices, Milestone is the most popular, there's NUUO, Luxriot, ExacqVision and plenty that does analytics like Geovision

What brand cameras are you getting or is that not decided yet? To get the most cameras on the slowest PC you need software capable of using the camera's motion detection instead of using it's own. The most common software for this is ExacqVision, but the cameras supported may be limited so make sure the cameras you are buying work with this. I believe Milestone does this but only for certain cameras. The other choice is go with a brand that provides the software. To me, the best NVR software I've used is ACTi NVR 3.0, but only works with their cameras and 16 cameras for free, after that you pay. Have not tried Avigilon so can't comment if it's better or worse. Clearly if you are buying Avigilon cameras, that's the way to go. Lastly is to go with a camera that has the NVR solution built in like Axis Edge or Mobotix. Unfortunately, Axis Camera Companion only works with up to 16 cameras, so that leaves Mobotix. I like Mobotix because you can have clusters of 3-4 cameras writing to a NAS near the cameras and then view and manage them all from one PC with their free CMS software. Very low CPU use since the cameras do all the heavy lifting.

My 3 Dahua cameras are set to VBR and had them FTP and the video's were perfect. Could be a bug in the firmware for that camera.

What NVR or NVR software are you using? Did you just try and FTP video events and see if it does it there. That way you can see if the bug is in the NVR or NVR software.

Is it stuck? Did you try manully setting it to night mode from the menus? Does the IR LEDs come on?

Foscam even has a real outdoor PTZ camera but it's VGA resolution and costs $400-500.

Pete, clearly you are giving up too early. Just searching eBay, there's plenty of PTZ camera for under $150 that are 1.3MP or 720P. Sure, the Z in PTZ like your Edimax is digital zoom, and they are indoor cams that you have to seal in a housing or a glass mason jar, but certainly no worse than what you have now and mo-bits.

Haha, so you are saying that the best way to connect our 1,600' and 1,000' links is by buying 10 switches, having 110VAC installed every 300' to plug them into, install pedestals to house them and that would save me a lot of money because I wouldn't need $500 on two pairs of extenders? We should have you on this project because clearly I don't get it.

Is that bad? We have cameras 500 meters from the switch. Considering the physical limit of a segmet of copper to 568 standards is 100 meters then yes. That's crazy, 100m is the limit for Cat5 Ethernet, not for copper. You can run extenders over copper twisted pair easily for a kilometer.

Is that bad? We have cameras 500 meters from the switch.

There are probably plenty of high quality 1080P PTZ camera with 20-30X zoom out there for under $150, you just have look and report back when you find them because I want one too. Check Alibaba.com or AliExpress.com, thats the place for deals.

Just plug in a another switch to the PoE ports on the back of the NVR to extend that internal network.

I have a 24" touchscreen tablet on my desk, Just needs Windows 8 and I'm ready to start walking around with it, just needs 110VAC and someone to help me carry it.

Maybe many panels are as you described but we pulled a panel in one of our properties last week and it was left side on one leg, right on the other and could be that way because it's old. The panel was modified by the builder not to allow any more breakers even though the panel had room, so we had our electrician swap it out which seems easy but increased the cost of the job a bunch. But there was a bar on one side, one on the other, didn't look like the picture above. I think it's easier if they are every other one, then you can just move the breaker possibly down or up one spot but I agree, I use a licensed electrician to do this.

No, that's a good location to avoid.

Most houses have the power outlets split on 1-2 breakers and usually on the same leg. If not, you can have an electician swap circuits with something else from one side to the other. If you are not sure, go to your electical panel and see if the outlets are on the same side of the panel. Not sure a dimmer will cause a problem because lights are typically on a different breaker. I have tons of dimmers and have no issues with PowerLine adapaters. But then there's always stories about old homes, poor wiring jobs, make for good HGTV stories. If that occurs, it's best to move

I like the way you piggy-backed the injector on top of the powerline adapter, works for me.