New here – really glad to have found this site. The concept of running IP camera’s has been super daunting (still is), but I’m finally getting the courage of tackling the task – albeit with some extra help.
Firstly, I apologize for the long post, and while I did attempt to draw up a layout in Sketchup, I’m quite bad at it and need some practice. I’ll do my best to describe it in detail though.
A bit about the home. We built the two story home in 1999-2000, and originally had analog/coaxial wiring ran for the current surveillance cameras. They currently are installed and along the way have updated the cameras/DVR back in 2008. Even the DVR system is quite lackluster in features, and specific recording is difficult to find. The entire system is quite flaky and the cameras themselves don’t seem to work longer than a few months before we end up having to reset all of them manually. The contractor who initially installed them was having his own problems and simply never completed the job properly. Since then we’ve had a few people come through and get them to work, but nothing with much permanence. We have a total of 6 surrounding the property of roughly 3 acres. The home sits about 300 feet away from the front entry gate, and backs up against a large chain of lakes here in the southeast.
Analog Camera 1 - Dome Camera: Installed at the front gate, on the wall. Captures images of people coming in and out of the gate. Does a decent job of capturing just the driveway, nothing more.
Analog Camera 2 – Bullet Camera: Installed under the eave of garage one. Captures whoever is coming up the driveway before they pull into the circular drive in front of the home.
Analog Camera 3 – Bullet Camera: Installed under the eave of garage two. Pointed towards the front door/front porch area to see who is at the front door. This image is probably one of the most important, but still the image is not super clear, and every few months the camera begins to loosen from the washer/nut and we’re left with a picture of the bushes under the eave.
Analog Camera 4 – Dome Camera: Installed in the covered patio, takes a decent shot of the entire covered patio.
Analog Camera 5 – Dome Camera: Installed under the back corner of the eave of the summer kitchen/cabana. Really in a poor location and only captures one of the back doors and part of the uncovered pool deck.
Analog Camera 6 – Bullet Camera: Installed under the other eave of the summer kitchen/cabana pointed towards the backyard, boat house and lake.
Asides from the lack luster performance of the system, one of the biggest flaws is the inability to view the cameras when inside the house with ease. The only time the cameras are all viewable is if you go upstairs to the second floor, and proceed to the mechanical closet off of the master suite which houses all of the lighting and central networking of the home.
Now, when I mention the central networking – I need to clarify something. The home was prewired with Cat5 and we made the initial investment of making sure this was done. However, in 1999-2000, the technology was still quite premature for residential homes and as I mentioned above the contractor did not follow through and complete the job. The past 15 years have definitely been trial and error, but so far we’ve gotten everything to work with high speed cable internet. While it is rather basic, the home is definitely capable of much more. However, the biggest gripe is having things go wrong, and then paying someone hourly to come back and fix it. We’ve dumped a lot of money into the Vantage lighting, Crestron home automation, and all the other doodads that were advanced in 2000, but are becoming dated now.
We’re in the process of re-evaluating our entire networking system in the home, with the expansion of high speed internet and smart devices, we’d really like to begin utilizing them. With the size of the home, some of the biggest challenges has been getting a good wireless signal in far corners of the house. Being able to utilize the existing ethernet ports in each room for additional access points would really be quite helpful.
Having spent some time researching, the biggest thing we want out of the system is usability and ease of use. The biggest thing we’ll need to tackle is wiring. This will be the biggest project I think, with second being getting the current networking system figured out. So far, we are leaning towards having additional cameras installed outside, and then adding an additional few to the inside. We are still torn about adding cameras inside, since there are family members with mixed opinions on this. I can understand their apprehension, and I do think we’d probably feel more comfortable having the entire outside covered, and then possibly covering the major entry ways of the inside of the home.
We are not interested in making this a super high-end system, or spending the equivalent of a new luxury car on all this, but we also aren’t interested in purchasing new cameras one or two years down the road. I understand that technology – especially internet technology is never perfectly plug and play/set it and forget it, but we’d like to get as close to this as possible. I can completely side with the concept of buying once, and crying once. Over the years we’ve learned that getting things done cheaper, ultimately ends up being more expensive in the long run.
With that all said, a few points and questions that I would be greatly appreciative of, if they could be addressed:
1) With all the reading I’ve done so far, it seems theres varying opinions about using an NVR or an NAS, with the favor being for the NAS. I understand the differences and am willing to tackle building or purchasing an inexpensive PC for this, and then running an NVR software on the PC. While I’m not fond of using PC’s since the entire family has switched over to the Mac OSx platform a few years back, my understanding is there’s not a whole lot of Mac specific NVR software.
2) There are a total of four cameras that we’d like to add that are simply too far to run Cat5 cable. Running, and burying this cable will be much too cost intensive and I’m strongly leaning towards creating a wireless bridge for these four cameras.
One will be located at the front of the gate, in addition to the one analog already installed. Another will installed on a very large oak tree directly in front of the home to capture the front door. We are still undecided about this one. The remaining two will be installed to the rear of the house. One on the cabana/summer kitchen overlooking the entire backyard, and the other on the boat house taking a wide angle of either the backyard or the entry to the boat house. All of these places have power to them. I was considering going with Ubiquiti’s wireless bridge’s like the Nanostation or the more expensive Powerbridge (may be overkill). Do any of you use a wireless bridge for your outdoor cameras? Will video quality be quite shoddy? Should I scrap using a wireless bridge all together? Any opinions/advice here would be helpful.
3) With regards to wiring, the five new cameras will be going in the following locations:
- 2 covering each garage under the 1st floor eave
- 1 up high on the 2nd story eave covering the entire front yard
- 1 on the front porch looking down covering the front door
- 1 up high on the 2nd story eave looking down at the entire back yard
My 4th question is three fold:
A) does the port box that receives these 5 cat5 cables HAVE to be right next to the cable modem? Is it possible for them all to feed to an easier location say the garage on the first floor, and then send a single Cat5 cable from the back of the port switch up to the cable modem/NVR or PC on the 2nd floor? I’m just thinking in terms of wiring, it’s obviously easier to shoot just one wire up through a wall, as opposed to numerous ones. Obviously, I should probably leave the wiring to the professionals, but I’m also thinking of what would be easiest on my wallet. If worse comes to worst, I could always run the cat5 wiring up externally along the side of the house through an EMT conduit right along the gutter up into the attic.
B) To simplify wiring say on each side of the house – if I have 3 cameras on the RIGHT side, and 4 on the LEFT side – could I have a separate port switch for each set of cameras? So, two port switches, one on the left for the 4 cameras, and then one on the right for the 3 cameras? As long as I have enough space on the port box next to the cable modem (which is actually currently my wireless router), would this work? Or should I run ALL the cameras to ONE large port switch, regardless of how long the Cat5 cable run will be?
C) Wiring for the front door is particularly complicated and has me concerned. As I mentioned – this is one of the most important areas we’d like to have surveillance to. This camera and the one at the front of the gate are the two most important ones in the entire system. With that said, the front entry way is quite complicated. There is limestone surrounding the façade, with the entire wall being cement and stucco. The front door is 14ft tall and a heavy wrought iron with glass, so no room for a peep hole camera. We’d love to have a camera put in place of the intercom system, but it is a dated Panasonic business enterprise TPX system which doesn’t have video capability. We really don’t want to start drilling holes and running external wiring ruining the appearance of the front entrance.
As I mentioned before, the current bullet analog camera solves this by being under the eave of the adjacent garage pointed directly at the front door. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best currently we can do.
The front entry way is a covered porch, with the roof being a step out balcony above. The only thing I can think of, is positioning a turret or dome camera off to the corner of the ceiling of the porch, and then running the Cat5 cabling up along the side of the balcony directly into the home office which is the room adjacent to the balcony on the second story. The wire would be barely noticeable, but there is no other way I for see without causing a ton of drywall damage inside the foyer. The ceiling of the porch is about 14.5-15 feet so I’m not too concerned about someone putting a ladder up there to cut the wire. It could be done of course, but I assume there would be other camera’s still working to still identify the burglar.
The only other thing I can think of is putting a very small pinhole size camera (I’ve seen Axis makes one for peepholes) into the stone balustrade or below it and then running the cat5 cable under ground back over to join the other cabling under the eaves of the garages. I’m reluctant about this only because I don’t really want to drill into the stone balustrade, and I think finding a robust outdoor pinhole camera may prove difficult. That area is pressure washed, and of course sprinklers and constant rain here in the southeast may take it’s toll. I really don’t want to end up a few years down the road and realize it was a bad idea only to be left with an ugly hole in the stone.
Those of you with cement construction – how did you work around this? Did you drill through the wall INTO the house and then figure out what to do with the wire, or did you run the wire along the exterior wall of the front entryway and then figure out a place for it?
5) In regards to a PC to utilize with my NAS system – I’ve read from some that for some of the NVR softwares (for example ACTI) – these are fairly light on processing consumption, and a simple $400-500 Dell or the like will suffice, while some of the other NVR softwares – Blue Iris and Milestone are more taxing and require a much bigger processor.
With that said – what kind of specs should I be looking for in a PC? If I do decide to switch over to a different NVR software for example, I don’t really want to purchase a new PC all over. I’d rather just do it right the first time if I do need to purchase one that’s stronger. I’ve seen most of the NVR’s come with an i7 processor. Would 4 gb suffice, or should I look for 8? What about a video card? Any recommendations?
6) With regards to software – as I mentioned above, I would definitely prefer a Mac platform, but understand these are scarce. Does anyone have experience with Ben Software? This is Mac specific?
7) To followup with the last question – one of the cameras we’re considering are the ACTi camera’s. One of the things that are attractive is the fact that they give you their own NVR software for up to 16 cameras. On the other hand, if I decide to jump into this after having the initial wiring done, and desire more cameras – I’ll have to step away from ACTi’s NVR software and move into something else. The other thing is also the fact if I decide to mix and match cameras, ACTi’s NVR software will only work with their cameras which could pose a problem.
I see Blue Iris and Milestone’s X-Connect Go (free) recommended here. I don’t have any qualms with paying a little for a license within reason, but I can’t stomach going with a program like Synology and paying $300-400 for just 4 cameras, and then having to pay more for additional. Do you have any recommendations for a decent budget minded program to manage the cameras.
The biggest capability we really want is simply to be able to see the cameras on our smart devices – Ipads/Iphones, etc. It’s really helpful when we’re all in the kitchen as a family and someone comes to the door or if we’re in the bedroom and want to see if the pest control guy showed up. Obviously the remote access is also a plus when we’re not home to check up on our dogs or people working at the house.
Lastly, the question about cameras. The cameras I think we’re looking at are going to be a mixture of turret/Dome cameras and bullet cameras. While I’d love a PTZ camera, it may be out of my budget right now, but if this project turns out successful I may consider one in the future.
So far, the three main companies that I’ve narrowed it down to are:
a) ACTi
b) Hikvision
c) Dahua
We’re strongly leaning towards ACTi for the construction and US support. I was under the impression the warranty was longer on the ACTi, but I see that Hikvision’s is also 36 months/3 years. Price is a consideration, but I do see that ACTi does offer some nice models in our price range. We’re looking to keep each camera <$400, but may spend more on a specific camera for a location if required.
For example, the ACTi E96/E97 Fisheye minidome would be quite helpful in the center hallway of the house which could overlook all 4 sides of the inside of the house.
However, I do see the Hikvision is also quite competitive in regards to price, and we could save some money there – especially if we end up going down the road with mixing and matching cameras, then staying loyal to ACTi just for their NVR software is a moot point.
I like some of the positive reviews about Dahua and the NVR software that comes with them seems user friendly, but I don’t like the lack of documentation and support. I’m also not 100% convinced of their customer support and robustness in an outdoor environment. I could see using them maybe for the interior of our home, but I think the harsh humidity, lightning and torrential rains may require something a bit stronger outside.
I think that about covers the majority of my questions so far. I’m still new to this, and honestly don’t have a clue about the networking part of it. I’m probably going to pay someone to do this part, but in the process teach me how to troubleshoot if things go wrong down the road.
The web communities and forums I’ve looked over have also all been really helpful. I’ve really appreciated everyone’s responsiveness to helping newcomers to this field. Thank-you again.
