What do I need to spend for a reasonable home CCTV setup?

Hadouken

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I appreciate that's a totally open thread title that presents so many questions but here's where I'm coming from...

Got up this morning to find that I'm pretty sure someone has tried my car door through the night. The handle is now knackered.
I'd been toying with home CCTV for so long but like every other statistic, I wait for something to happen before really starting to do something about it.

Now I could pay 4 figures and have someone come in with their drills and their cables for a really good setup but at this stage I'm not really wanting to do that.

I would prefer wireless, although I'm not closed minded to wired.

I obviously want a camera at the front of the house pointing at the drive. Side of house and out the back are at this moment in time not a necessity but again, I'm not against it and somewhere at the end of it all I'd probably have those anyway.

Now if anything is going to happen then highly likely it'll be when it's dark, so being able to pick up something semi-worthwhile in the dark is a must. No good being heavily pixelated. Good in bad weather will be a must but I imagine most are anyway?

Just looking for something decent enough without breaking the bank that I can probably put up myself that will serve as a 'that'll do for now' until later down the line when I maybe look at getting a company to install something 'proper'.

But don't want to just jump on Amazon now, close my eyes and click and wind up with something that's just tosh.
 
First thing to decide, do you want continuous recording or rely on triggered recording only ?

You mention wireless, do you mean truly wireless with battery for power ? In which case you will probably find yourself limited to triggered only recording.

If you are going to put in a cable for power then you might as well get a wired system which will also be more reliable.
 
I'm extremely happy with my Hik-Vision DS-7608NI-K2 / 8P.


I had it installed in April 2021. My local electrician supplied and install it for me. Installation took a day. It involved running CAT 5e (Ethernet) cable to each camera location, crimping RJ45 plugs and mounting the cameras to the house. Aligning the cameras to a get an optimal view of my property, without overlooking the neighbours' homes took some trial and error.

I have 3 PoE (Power over Ethernet) cameras. The image quality is superb. Night time images are in full colour and look almost as good as day. The NVR unit sits in the loft, connected to my home network. All of the cameras connect directly into RJ45 Ethernet sockets on the back of the NVR unit and the NVR supplies the PoE capability (the rest of your home network doesn't require the use of PoE switches). The cameras are on a separate Class C network to the rest of the house (the DVR acts as a router).

I had a few issues with the software to start with. I'm using Microsoft Edge (Chromium) on Windows, and initially I had some trouble displaying live images due to the technology Hik-Vision were using to render the images in the browser (an add-on is required). But newer versions of the software have resolved it (works fine on Windows 10 and Windows 11). The App on iOS works well.

The web interface for accessing the recorded video is pretty good, however I found the timeline interface a bit of a pain when I wanted to export over two hours of footage to a file. There's also a native Windows application called iVMS 4200 (v3.5.0.5) but I mostly use the Web browser interface.

There's been several firmware updates - the UK tech support is pretty terrible, but if you're reasonably familiar with flashing firmware etc. and performing software maintenance tasks - you should be OK. I update firmware religiously, and check for updates at least once per month. If you're not someone who tends to do this, then it may not be the best solution for you.

Prior to the Hik-Vision system I had a Samsung CCTV system. Samsung disposed of their CCTV business almost as soon as I had purchased it, and support ended. I'm much happier with the Hik-Vision system over the Samsung system.

PDF showing my home network topology is attached.

Regards,
James.
 

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Hello
I originally put in a single camera just for fun to monitor our chickens in a run in the garden. This escalated ( quickly ) into a small CCTV system.

This is not professional so you can bear that in mind but I can give you my own experience:

The cameras were:

Amazon product ASIN B07RW5BMXX
no longer available but there are loads like this. The important thing for me was that it has 2 way audio and that it has a protocol ( ONVIF ) that my system can find.

I tried wireless at first - useless - then switched to wired. These particular cameras are not POE but I use a splitter pair for signal and power. I use TPlink Powerline aethernet over power lines to connect to my router.

The cameras have been on 24/7 with no outages. Great day and night vision. Likely to trip motion detect a bit too frequently but this is a common problem.

Finally, I already had a Synology NAS and I use the two free channels on Synology surveillance app to harvest and record the streams - saved for 3 months on a rolling basis. Without this life would be more difficult.

So its probably 60-90 per camera; Wiring as you need snd, in my case a NAS server ( expensive ).

You do need to think about security escpecially if you are using an IP camera system rather than a hardwired CCTV cameras and standalone recorder. Also, I guess my fixings of the cameras and wiring are just to easy to defeat ( eg cut ) and so on.
 

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