Month: November 2019

Here’s a summary of the whole installation. I’m happy with the Reolink cameras and the recording system. I wish the motion detection worked better, but I don’t think any of the brands have a better solution using HD camera feeds. I will have to look at proximity sensors. I have have bought a simple one and I have built one from scratch that I need to figure out how to add it into the whole security scheme. I’d like to be notified when a person comes to the front door, and when the mailman is delivering the mail, and if someone opens the side gates. Then I could look at the cameras myself.

The NVR works pretty well, but doesn’t let you plug in a keyboard, only a mouse. I had to turn off the need to enter your password to make changes because it’s so slow to ‘type’ with a mouse. The iPhone app works great, and does everything the NVR interface does. I can get all 4 cameras running live on one screen.

On a PC, there is client application which streams full screen really nicely. It’s a little hard to get the playback working however. You must first click on the Playback button, then on the little camera icon that looks more like a rear-view mirror. Then you have to drag the camera onto one of the 4 window panels. Nothing happens until you click the play arrow on the bottom left. Still, nothing may happen. You have to be sure you have video being recorded. The phone app seems to work a lot better for this. On both the phone and the PC client, you can save local snapshots or movies. Having motion detection turned on will flag the times on the timeline where there was motion.

But as I have said, motion detection is sketchy. Here is what gets picked up.

Moths show up really well at night. I like the glowing red rings that show you when the IR night vision is turned on, but it makes these bugs really shine. Also, when the IR lights turn on and the cameras switch to night vision, it triggers the motion detection.

I have installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. It links into the NVR to grab snapshots every 20 seconds. I can’t seem to get real time video yet. I think that using Home Assistant is the way to get the proximity sensor working. I do use it to turn off the monitor screen in the garage every night and turn it back on in the morning.

You can see that Home Assistant knows that the TV is on and how much power the solar panels are generating. I can turn off the Security Monitor from this dashboard also.

I spent many fun and frustrating hours installing the cameras. I hope it can work out to be a little more useful in the future.

I had one more camera and no good place to put it. I want to cover the side door, but the neighbors would be staring back at a camera placed at the front of the house looking toward the backyard.

I would also have a problem getting the wiring done on this side of the garage since there are cabinets on the inside. Furthermore, I would like the option of putting cameras at the other corner looking back this way, but there is no attic above that corner of the house and I’m not crawling around in the basement.

The one thing left that we wanted to cover was the third car that the kid’s park down the street. We have lots of little leaves and olives dropping onto the street right in front of our house, so it’s not the best place to leave a car. The driveway camera doesn’t cover the area down the street. Installing another camera off the garage looking back over the cars will be the easiest position, so that’s where it’s going. It will be installed just like the first camera was. Here’s the area inside the garage.

Things went pretty quickly with this installation.

I had to carve a curved gully in the block of wood like I did with the first camera and somehow managed to avoid getting a picture of it again. But I got everything to fit.

This view lets us watch cars all the way to the end of the block. With 4K resolution, it’s actually possible.

While I was up in the attic I surveyed the area at the far end of the front porch. I’d have to wade through the insulation dust and find a good place to punch a hole in the wall, or one up through the ceiling of the porch. I had such good coverage of the front, I decide that what I really needed was a camera on the front door and there are two sides to the porch, so I went with the easier side and drilled a hole in the garage wall. This ended up being two feet from where I wanted to put the NVR control unit. I had a hard time getting all the wires all the way through this whole, which wasn;t exactly straight for some reason. The power and reset cables went down the inside of the wall and I had to fish them out. You don’t want to drop the cables before you attach the camera and you can’t attach the camera until you get the cables through the wall. this is a problem I had with every camera install.

I used lots of silicone to insulate this camera. I used one of the 1 foot cables to connect this camera to the NVR. I found a DVD shelf at Home Depot for under $15 that I installed next to the Data Cabinet. I used a bit of hook and loop strapping to loosely attache the unit to the shelf.

I like the monitor here because I can see through the garage door when I hear things outside. I will probably attach the monitor better because it’s not earthquake proof, but I had an extra monitor anyway.

The cable for this camera comes in just above the NVR.

The back of the house has a section that extends outward so that there is no one place that a camera can be set in order to cover all doors and windows. But the next best placement is on the corner looking back at the door. It’s a good place because it covers almost all of the patio and the back door, and it’s easy to install and wire. The telephone cable gets in the way, but it also provides coverage the the rats as they come and go. Yes, the rats. I think we have the attic protected pretty well. Within the first few minutes of watching the first nighttime image I caught this guy balancing on the wire.

The camera was easy to install on the side of the rafter. It was 17 feet up there so I wasn’t so worried about protecting the cable. I started drilling through the wire ventilation mesh and when I got resistance, I climbed higher to look in there with some light and found that there was a board covering up the bottom of the the vent hole. And I was afraid of blocking airflow.

I made a hole where the cable could go and attached two Ethernet cables to the end of an 8 foot drill bit, one that you use to drill down through walls to install new outlets. I pushed the rod and cables way up into the attic so that I wouldn’t have to crawl out the the edge. This actually worked well. I wanted to run an extra cable in case I wanted to put another camera up there pointing the other way. i actually might use it to install a temperature sensor.

Then came many days of super hot weather. So the attic work would have to wait. The next cool morning I could get up there. I spent some time trying to shove cables up the crack in the wall in the garage where the electrician had run all of the Ethernet cables when we remodeled. I didn’t want to make it much bigger, or make a new hole. This area of the garage is above the washer and dryer, the sink and the hot water heater. Kind of hard to get up there. I stuck a 15 foot Ethernet cable and a new length of cable up the hole in case the finished cable I was going to be running didn’t reach. I went up to the attic and spent some exasperating time up there climbing under and over and through holes with mask and goggles and hats and gloves and hoped I would make it down again.

We have shredded paper fiber insulation blown in to the attic so if you touch any of it be prepared to breath it in for the next 15 minutes. The gap where all the wires go through comes out into the attic under the old roof, so I had to reach through a hole in the roof to get to the old attic. I can almost reach it. This was the most frustrating part of the installation because I had to lie on my belly while on a sloping roof and reach blindly down to a tight hole to retrieve one of a dozen wires. The cable that came with the camera made it all the way through the hole plus 2 feet. I got some 8 wire Ethernet extenders so that the power lines as well as the data lines get passed through. Some cheap female/female extenders only pass the data lines. I pulled the wires through but I accidentally pulled the wire I had sent up on this end instead of the other cable I was pushing down from the attic. This was put there so I wouldn’t have to deal with this in the future. Oh well.

On the outside, I filled in the hole around the cables with silicone caulk. The camera is weatherproof and the cable from the camera goes into the attic. The cases that come with the cables that are to be used to protect the connections do not fit. There is a wide wire strain-relief on the Ethernet cable that gets in the way of the rubber stopper so that you can’t shove the casing all the way in to make a connection. I didn’t fiddle with it since they are all inside anyway.

I thought that I could easily add 6 or 8 cameras around the house. But having that much data recorded all day long would slow down the system and cause the 3TB hard drive to have to over write data much sooner. So I tried to figure out the 4 best places to setup cameras.

I went around to every corner of the house and took pictures with my phone, holding it up as high as I could. I then printed these pictures out to examine them. There is a door to the kitchen on the side of the house, but it’s very close to the fence and the neighbor’s patio where they spend a lot of time. I can’t figure out a way to stay neighborly and have a camera pointed right at them. Actually, in the camera setup you can mask out any regions you want to, but they don’t know that.

I thought that the front porch camera should be at the far end of the porch so that we could see people head on walking up to the porch. But the placement of the camera there would mean that I’d have to run a cable through the stucco on the side and along the outside to the porch and around the porch beams. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend that much time in the attic and on the outside of the walls making it secure and tidy. The other end of the porch is almost as good and, when I installed the NVR in the garage on the other side of the wall, I only needed 1 foot of cable. Maybe next year I’ll put the camera on the other end of the porch.

The first camera installed went up near the driveway where I had installed motion sensor lights before. I wanted to keep the lights so I installed the camera to the next rafter over. This covered the area between the cars in the driveway and much of the street out front.

The next camera was in the backyard, looking over the rear sliding door entrance. This camera watches the cats and the back patio. The family room add-on sticks out farther then the back bedroom, so there is an uncovered window behind the camera, but I can’t figure out any better place. The other corner is outside the family room which has a vaulted ceiling so there is no attic. I’d have to run a cable through the basement or down the length of the outside of the house. Or switch to battery powered wi-fi cameras.

Then I drilled through the stucco wall to the porch camera.

Finally, I installed one more camera in the front, on the other side of the driveway. This covered the cars again, but looking down the street I could pick up the Kid’s car because they park in front of the neighbor’s house. There are no trees there to drop olives and leaves on cars like there is in front of our house. The first camera I installed is now pretty redundant because the other two cameras cover the same area. But it does get a nice perspective between the cars and of the street directly in front of the house.

I’d like to have a camera watching the left side of the house, but we’d watching the wildlife in the dark area along the fence, and also the other neighbors because the cameras have such wide angle lenses.

I think we might consider adding a door bell cam. Some door bell cameras have proximity sensors that are more reliable than the motion detection of the the other cameras. Usually, these are wi-fi cameras and battery powered and have to send pictured to the web. All things i don;t want. What I want is to be notified when someone comes to the front door or when a package is delivered to the porch. Luckily, the Reolink package wasn’t stolen before we got to it.