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.