System Design Plan / Feedback?

[Tom P 0]

Hello,

 

First time post, thank you in advance for your thoughts about my system design idea below...

 

System Goal: Provide "extra eyes" to the front of the house since our view that direction is limited. There's been vandalism and theft which has occurred multiple times in the neighborhood and would like to capture activity for replay later.

 

Interests:

1) Start small in quantity but with great quality for later expansion.

2) My wife is disabled and home much of the time. Would like real-time viewing / control from her iPad if possible.

3) Remote alerts and viewing by Smart device (iPad/iPhone) when away.

4) Record and playback without complexity / efficiently.

 

My thoughts to start:

1) Camera at "B" Position - At the peak looking over driveway. Maybe Hikvision = DS-2CD2732F-IS ?

2) Camera at "H" Position - Looking at entry and front porch / front door = maybe DS-2CD2532F-IWS ?

3) Camera at "I" Position - Maybe a PTZ covering up and down street and full rotation into entry area = ?

 

Being a bit of a geek, can fixed 1) or 2) trigger the 3) PTZ to track movement all the way to the front door?

 

Attached is an overview with measurements and an actual front photo of our house.

 

Thanks!

Tom

[ssnapier 0]

I think I would put 4 total cameras up if it were me. The one down the side of the house would need to be varifocal for sure to tweak it down to exactly what you are comfortable with. The other cameras would all be pretty wide shots. You easily could narrow those views if you don't want to record the street.

 

This is kinda of what I was thinking.

[mshaffer 0]

One thing I wish I did differently was to install separate IR illuminators. Those cameras with the IR LED's around the lens don't really light things up well at a distance, at least not the ones I installed. Plus the IR LED's attract bugs which will fly right in front of the camera and set off the motion detection in your DVR. Best thing would be to install IR sensitive cameras but put the IR flood lights away from the cameras. At least that's what I would try if I had to do it over again.

[mshaffer 0]

BTW those eaves will make great places to mount the cameras. They'll be protected from weather and will be pretty hidden. This is pretty obvious but they sell cameras in either white, black, gray, etc so you might want to get ones that match the eaves. Guess that's probably pretty obvious though..

[mshaffer 0]

Another thing I agree with the other poster with putting the cameras on the lower corners. If you put them high up it will be harder to see people's faces, plus it will make cleaning the lenses harder. It sucks going into your DVR to see what the latest motion detections have been and seeing hundreds of megabytes of spider webs blowing around.

[Tom P 0]

Thank you! All good ideas and insight. I like the lower corners approach since all along I was thinking high up in the eave peak looking down.

 

For front door camera, I suppose a side view is acceptable? Here again I was considering the over door option looking down as well.

 

I'm close to getting this going and will come back around with any other questions as this pretty basic set up comes together.

 

Tom P.