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Looking for advice on home security cameras

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Yeah it's a piss off that the laws basically protect the criminals. Pretty much need to make anything you do look like an accident, and even then they can still sue. If someone trips on their own feet on your property while trespassing they can sue. The law system sucks.
 
I'm eventually going to put up some Ubiquiti cameras to go with my Dream Machine Pro, which has NVR functionality built in. (They also sell a separate NVR device, but that's not really necessary for me.) My largest problem has been my house not having existing Ethernet wiring, nor having a great way to run it to the spots where I'd like to put cameras. I'm currently trying to work that out, so I'll hopefully have better access.

I think the only negative aspect is that while Ubiquiti finally released a doorbell camera, it's WiFi-based and uses the doorbell transformer to power it. I was really hoping that they'd release a PoE-based doorbell camera similar to Ring's existing offering.

deadlyapp said:
I'm not too worried about someone climbing up to my cameras and fishing the wire out and then breaking into my network
Click to expand...

While I doubt it's necessary, a separate VLAN would probably work for that.
 
Well most of you all will be disappointed to hear that I ended up spending like $900 or so to get into the Ring ecosystem.

I got the doorbell, a flood light camera, spotlight camera, and the 14 piece security system.
 
purbeast0 said:
Well most of you all will be disappointed to hear that I ended up spending like $900 or so to get into the Ring ecosystem.

I got the doorbell, a flood light camera, spotlight camera, and the 14 piece security system.
Click to expand...

Not sure it matters as long as it suits your needs. 😛 Anyway, the one thing I'd like to mention about the doorbells is that they aren't very timely. To be fair, I have a Nest Hello not a Ring doorbell, but to give you an idea, I can walk out my door to the trashcan (about 10 seconds away), drop a bag of trash in, walk back toward the front door, and finally get an alert when I'm about to reach the door. That's kind of why I was looking at Ubiquiti's option since it's all handled locally, which should make responses far faster due to being able to avoid cloud processing. Although, as noted, I'd really prefer a PoE option as that would keep the camera functioning during any sort of outage (my PoE switch is on a UPS).
 
purbeast0 said:
Well most of you all will be disappointed to hear that I ended up spending like $900 or so to get into the Ring ecosystem.

I got the doorbell, a flood light camera, spotlight camera, and the 14 piece security system.
Click to expand...

I have a doorbell and floodlight cam. Looking to get another floodlight cam for the side door to the garage.

This is from the floodlight cam. It is mounted to the eves of the house and it is about 10' off the ground. Takes a nice picture and I've had this thing record a spider at 1AM casting a web in front of the camera. It has also picked up various critters walking on our grass in the middle of the night, namely a rabbit and a opossum.

floodlight.jpg

The doorbell cam.

Doorbell.jpg
 
purbeast0 said:
Well most of you all will be disappointed to hear that I ended up spending like $900 or so to get into the Ring ecosystem.

I got the doorbell, a flood light camera, spotlight camera, and the 14 piece security system.
Click to expand...
Here you go --
www.reviewgeek.com

Ring Cameras Have a Security Problem, and It's up to the Company to Fix It

Ring cameras have a security problem. The company blames users for reusing passwords, but it's time Ring stepped up and did more to protect the people who buy its products.
www.reviewgeek.com www.reviewgeek.com
 
JulesMaximus said:
I have a doorbell and floodlight cam. Looking to get another floodlight cam for the side door to the garage.

This is from the floodlight cam. It is mounted to the eves of the house and it is about 10' off the ground. Takes a nice picture and I've had this thing record a spider at 1AM casting a web in front of the camera. It has also picked up various critters walking on our grass in the middle of the night, namely a rabbit and a opossum.

View attachment 27104

The doorbell cam.

View attachment 27105
Click to expand...
Do you know by any chance if you can hook up the siren in the floodlight cam to go off in tandem with the Ring security system stuff? Like if a door tripped the alarm inside, can you make the floodlight cam siren go off with it?

The other 2 cameras I got for outside both have the siren on them too.

The one thing I am concerned about somewhat is the place I plan to put the floodlight camera is where I would just replace an old light I have near my garage. But it's like 6' off the ground. In theory someone could just come and rip it off, but by that time they would have already been on camera doing it. But still, I am not sure how I feel about that. I will see if I end up just putting it there or not.
 
purbeast0 said:
Do you know by any chance if you can hook up the siren in the floodlight cam to go off in tandem with the Ring security system stuff? Like if a door tripped the alarm inside, can you make the floodlight cam siren go off with it?

The other 2 cameras I got for outside both have the siren on them too.

The one thing I am concerned about somewhat is the place I plan to put the floodlight camera is where I would just replace an old light I have near my garage. But it's like 6' off the ground. In theory someone could just come and rip it off, but by that time they would have already been on camera doing it. But still, I am not sure how I feel about that. I will see if I end up just putting it there or not.
Click to expand...

I don't think I have a siren on mine but I can listen to anything the camera picks up on audio and I can talk through it too. Not sure if it has a siren or not. I just wanted to have the security of the camera recording and the Ring system does that pretty well so I'm happy with it. Plus, it is easy to use so my wife can view events on her cell phone from inside the house. My floodlight cam is far enough off the ground that you would need a ladder to get to it and it is mounted to the eves with long wood screws so it would not be easy to just pull down off of there.
 
JulesMaximus said:
I don't think I have a siren on mine but I can listen to anything the camera picks up on audio and I can talk through it too. Not sure if it has a siren or not. I just wanted to have the security of the camera recording and the Ring system does that pretty well so I'm happy with it. Plus, it is easy to use so my wife can view events on her cell phone from inside the house. My floodlight cam is far enough off the ground that you would need a ladder to get to it and it is mounted to the eves with long wood screws so it would not be easy to just pull down off of there.
Click to expand...
Gotcha. I am not how sure the siren thing is but all of the current cameras have two way and sirens. I know you can manually set the siren off with the app. I'd be shocked if it couldn't hook into the security system too.
 
Haven't read the thread but this is a very low budget choice.


There are 8 cams and each is precoded to the receiver/recorder. You just stick the cameras where you want and plug them in. Now there IS one trick involved. You need to set up the receiver someplace where it's roughly in the center of the perimeter defined by the placement of the cameras. In my case, I had get small aftermarket mast antennae. Even with those I sometimes see a camera drop out for a while and then come back.

I got it because it was 2 bills + change. I thought that was ridiculously cheap. The cams are 980p though, so don't plan on doing a lot of close inspection of the video.

The tech support, in China, was quite good at getting back to me whenever I shot myself in the foot. The only real problem I recall was that a couple of time I had to reinitialize a camera. Took like 10min.

If I didn't care about dropping a few grand on a system though, I would have gotten one that could interface with an alarm system. A lot of those will probably be proprietary though so I'm not sure that I'm missing much.

Oh, the only other thing I need was an hdd. Since I have a half dozen 2Tb drives, no problem.
 
So just an update to this.

I returned all of my Ring stuff today and got a Nest Hello and like it much better.

I returned the Ring stuff because I didn't "get" how the whole event thing works. The camera doesn't record 24/7 which is pretty stupid if you ask me and it only records when it's triggered. Mine would pick up cars driving by all the time, but then I'd get deliveries and it wouldn't even catch the UPS guy stopping infront of my house, getting out and walking up to my porch with a package, and walking back. And that happened multiple times. It wouldn't catch me pulling in my driveway and walking in my house. It is just not reliable.

So I got the Nest today. It records 24/7 and the camera is 4:3 and captures a much better image with no noticeable fisheye. The night view is also much better.

I will probably end up with the nest security stuff shortly too. It's pricier than the Ring stuff but it's better IMO. The fact the cameras simply don't record 24/7 for Ring is just a deal breaker especially when it doesn't catch everything. And I know you can mess with settings to make it more sensitive but I didn't care at this point.
 
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