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.
