ronp

What input types do the TVs have?

Simply tell/warn her (verbally and with a registered letter) that you are now recording everything in your yard 24x7 and you are prepared to show that video as evidence to the police and to the court. And, with that evidence, if she files false reports against you, you will pursue libel and slander charges against her in civil court. A Sharx Security SCNC3606 with a big SD card might work for your needs, but a warning to her of what you plan to do may be enough.

The specs for that camera say 10W max (probably when you first power it up) and 7W typical. Let's round up to 8W. P=IE or Watts = Amps * Volts. Solving for Amps: 8Watts / 12Volts = .66 Amps. So, for each hour of use you will need .66Amps. Over 24 hours you need .66 * 24 = 16Amp-Hours and over 4 days a grand total of 64Amp-Hours. Now, you never want to drain a battery more than half. You can do it a couple times with a standard car battery, but more than that and you will ruin the battery. Deep cycle and gel batteries are much more forgiving. That means you need a gel or marine 12V battery of 128Amp-Hours or more. There are lots of online battery sellers with these "large" batteries. Battery Mart is one. They have a 183 Ah Gel Cell Sealed Lead Acid Battery for $425. Keep in mind, you will need a special gel cell charger since these batteries require a special charging curve that's different from a car's alternator or standard wall-plug charger. Sellers of gel batteries usually sell the chargers, too. Just having the battery, and no solar panel, may be the way to go...as long as you don't mind lugging it up a ladder every four days to swap it out.

I'm sure it's electrical, not light, that blew out the camera. The cameras run off 12 or 24 volts and the video signal is approximately 1volt. If a lightning strike was close to the power cable or coax and induced say 50volts into it, the electronics would likely "fry" but there would be zero visible evidence of damage. No burning. No smoke. Just zapped microscopic wires inside one of the integrated circuits. It only takes one. As I said in an earlier post, I installed coax lightning arrestors at both ends of my video cable with an 8' ground rod at the camera. The arrestors are supposed to clamp (limit) the voltage to 5volts. Even that didn't protect my cameras on a later strike, but perhaps that one was too close.

No harm. No foul. When you get a camera selected post the power requirements and we'll figure out a solution. If you only need four days and the power use is low enough you may be able to scrap the solar panel and just hoist a fully-charged big-a$$ gel cell battery up the pole. At the end of four days get some long jumper cables and recharge it for a couple hours via your car parked under the pole - or swap it out.

Last summer I lost four cameras in one lightning strike. One camera was connected to my DVR via 200' of cable run along the ground and another by 400' of cable run along the ground. Two were cameras mounted on the side of the house with in-wall wiring. The DVR was on a name-brand UPS but the cameras were not protected. The DVR survived. I replaced the cameras and put coax lightning arrestors at both ends of the cable with 8' ground rods at the remote cameras and tied to AC ground in the house. During the next lightning storm both remote cameras got zapped again. Lightning will find a way. (And, yes, I did return and get replaced the cameras under warranty )

I answered the solar power part of your question in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=31565. Going with a solid state drive and a single camera will help out greatly and would probably allow this system to power everything for four sunny days rather than just one.

Do a web search for "uninterruptible power supply". You can pay between $50 and $100's depending on how many minutes/hours of operation you need on battery backup.

Another option is to buy a 96Amp-hour deep discharge marine battery (approx $100 at Walmart) and throw it on a car battery charger (or jump it from your car) for a couple hours every few days.

You'll need to look up the specs for the camera and find out how much power it draws. With that you can determine what size battery and solar panel you need. Assume a typical camera (without IR LEDs) draws 150mA or .15Amps. Multiply that by 24hours and it will need 3.6Amp-hours over a full day. Your choice of a 9Ah battery is good because you never want to drain a battery lower than 50% and 3.6 is less than 4.5. A fully charged battery would power your camera for 24 hours with a little power to spare. Solar panel ratings are usually given in Watts. But, the rated output is under ideal, bright sun overhead, conditions. In real-life situations a 5 Watt panel over the course of a day might average 3 Watts of output at best. Working backwards, let's say you want to put 4Ah (3.6Ah plus cushion) of energy back into the battery over 8 hours of good daylight. 4Amp-hours / 8 hours = 0.5 Amps. Watts = Amps * Voltage. Most solar panels output 14 Volts. 0.5Amps * 14Volts = 7 Watts so you'll need a panel that outputs at least 7 Watts. *Since real-world panel output is probably 50% of their rated ouput, I think you'll need a 15Watt panel to be safe and to account for energy loss and inefficiency. *These numbers assume that every day is sunny. There's no buffer for a single cloudy day. Double or triple your battery and solar panel to cover that. *You will also need a solar panel smart charger. Basic trickle chargers won't work because when the sun comes up your battery will need much more than a trickle to charge it back up, then as the battery charges over the day the charger needs to slowly switch over to just a trickle. *All the above calculations assume a camera that needs 0.15Amps of power, typical of many cameras that don't have IR LEDs. If your camera does have IR LEDs it will need much more power - perhaps 5 times as much. The bottom line is you often require a much larger solar panel system than you might first assume. It's very frustrating to buy and build a system then quickly finding out it won't last more than a day or two before going dead (I've been there). There's always an extension cord... Ron

In my neck of the woods you need to be a licensed low-voltage electrician to perform work on any building other than your own home. Stop by your city/county building/development office and ask them what you would need to install CCTV systems. Ultimately, I don't think you'll be "selling" your videos to individuals. When there's an auto accident it's the insurance companies that deal with each other. The only time people and lawyers get involved is if there's a civil suit brought by one party against the other and that's probably only in a small percentage of all the total accidents. You might want to float your ideas past the claims departments of the big-5 auto insurance companies to see what they think.

I'd head on down to my local SCORE office or community college and take a several week course on developing a business plan. Crunch all the numbers. How many accidents are there? How many of those people will want video? How will they know there is video? What are they willing to pay for that? What permit and licenses are required by the various governmnet agencies? What insurance is needed? What does all that cost? What does the equipment cost per location? What are the recurring costs? Etc Etc Etc. There are lots of ideas out there and this one has potential, but IMO there are many weeks of research and business planning to be done to see if it will work - all to be done LONG before you begin selecting equipment specs. Wise man once said: Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.

Given that the DVR successfully sent one message then you have the Internet/email settings correctly configured. Was it a test message or an actual alarm motion message that worked one time? If it was a test message then you still must not have the proper alarm settings on your DVR to send an email on motion alarm. If it was a single motion alarm message, then I don't know. Regarding the error message from Internet Explorer... Is the remote software you're using on your PC to view/operate your DVR compatible with Internet Explorer 10 (per the error dump that's what you're using)? My Q-See only works with IE8. It sort of works with IE9 but I get strange page layout issues and errors like you're getting. I haven't tried IE10.

What's the difference between the CNB VBM-24VF vs. VBN-24VF? An online authorized CNB dealer has the N model on clearance? Are the specs the same/different? Features? Newer vs. Older? The item description states that the VBN-24VF has the RS-485 interface option. Is that standard on both? I do want that so I can adjust the menu settings from a cheapo PTZ Camera Remote Controller/Programmer (I do have an extra twisted pair to the camera). - Ron

Okay. I bit and purchased four VBN-24VFs to replace four IR bullets. I'm tired of trudging outside every night with my 24' pole with the feather duster duct taped to the end to wipe off the spiders attracted to the IR. I'm banking on the street lights providing enough light for these cameras. I also bought the CC100 to remotely access the monalink OSD - one camera requires a 32' ladder to access. I only want to do that one more time and definitely not at night! The VBN-24VFs are on clearance and are substantially less than the going online price for the VBM models. I don't want to violate forum rules so if you google "CNB Dealer" and go to the clearance page you'll see the cameras listed. You have to email sales for the price. Once I get them installed I'll post back what I think of them. I'll also have four decent 1-year-old IR bullets for sale.

The retailer emailed me the following specs with the N version of the camera: - It uses the Monalisa 2 whereas the M model uses the original Monalisa. - It has a DSS (Digital Slow Shutter) feature. Slow shutter speed lets you adjust the amount of light striking the sensor, and essentially determines when the video sensor sends out its batch of data for processing, REGARDLESS of image quality. - It supports accessing the OSD through the video cable using the CNB CC100 coaxial remote controller. - It has an IP67 housing vs. the M's IP66. I still don't know why it's not listed on the CNB website and rarely appears for sale on the web. Although I wanted RS-485 for accessing the menu over twisted pair because I have a cheapo RS-485 Pelco device I may consider going with the N and buying the CC100 for $50.

I could not get my DVR (a Q-See) to send an email until I finally set up a gmail account and used it for sending. No matter what I tried, it gave me an error. I never figured out why, I just went with it because it worked. SSL = on SMTP Server = smtp.gmail.com SMTP PORT = 465 (not 587) SEND EMAIL = (yourgmailaddress@gmail.com) SEND PW = (your pw) RECV EMAIL = (destination email - which for me is not a gmail account) One thing, though. Some Internet Service Providers (particularly Comcast/Xfinity in the NE) do not allow emails to be sent from an SMPT server other than their own. I experience this when I visit my family and use my laptop to send email. If I use Outlook and not a web interface to send email using my own domain's smpt server it bounces back with an error. I need to temporary change the smpt server Outlook uses to Comcast's.

As Q2U said, you'll need internet access installed at the remote location. Call the cable TV company or phone company that covers the area and ask them what the minimum level of service is. You're probably looking at $50/month, maybe less for the first year as an introductory rate. Once you have that and their router installed, there are a variety of single IP cameras that you can connect to the router for streaming video to another location. I've had good luck with Sharx Security cameras for this type of application.

Can you make the image go from good to bad by manipulating/disturbing one end or the other? Lifting, pressing, twisting? I think you're just going to have to work at it to isolate the problem. Sometimes it's difficult to tell exactly where the problem is as it could be where the cable goes into the connector, inside the connector, the connector's center pin's contact with the connector on the camera, even the camera's connector. Paying more $$ for a cable usually means better quality construction (up to a point) but this problem could be corrosion or even a faulty connector on the camera. Continuous pressure or tension on the cable end could cause a bad connection to form even in a quality cable.

Ah, I see. They do have different case configurations (pics below). The VBM does not have the 25x80mm protrusion from the back. I was thinking it did and therefore needed a 3.5" hole to recess it into for surface mount.

I don't understand what you mean by "if i mess about with the cable and power supply it comes up ok.... but i cant deduce its the cable or power......". It looks like it is a bad connection at the video cable, either at the cable's BNC connector or at the BNC connector on the camera.

Okay, I'm dense. The difference still isn't clear to me... VCM is Surface/Flush Mount. VBM is Surface Mount, only. Is the only difference that the VCM has the "back box" between the camera and the wall/ceiling? Does the VBM require a 3.5" hole for the protrusion to push through?

Speaking of teenagers and obvious cameras preventing crimes... Here's a video of a visible camera acting as a deterrent. Three teenage boys (without dates) on New Years Eve a couple years ago were scouting out our house under construction. This video was taken with a cheap qsee camera/dvr bundle from Costco. Watch the guy in the back at 11-13 seconds when his friend points out the camera. How's the old saying go, "First you say it, then you do it." - Ron

Do a websearch for "PLATECAM2". Ron

Giving us the camera and DVR make/models and the type of cable you're using to connect them would be helpful.