Cameras for new house

[NimitzHarrington]

Hello,

We've recently completed construction of our new house and I'm looking to get some IP cameras installed. I asked the sparky to pre-wire Cat6 cables at a few locations around the house. POE will be provided by a 250W Ubiquiti Unifi switch. I was initially looking at their G3 Pro cams until I ran into this forum and the wiki

Details:
1. Front of house is 32m across, and ~8m to the footpath.
2. Left side of house flush against the fence.
3. Right side of house has ~2m wide corridor, with side gate.
4. Rear of the house is 16m across, and 6m to the fence.
5. Corridor at the rear of the garage.

Eaves height is 3m.


Overall photo of the house (courtesy of IPVM calculator):


What I was thinking for the front, side and rear is as follows.

Front:
One cam on the left pointed right, and one on the right pointed left. The camera on the left will be fully exposed to the elements as it's on the garage outer wall. The center area is a covered porch, where we have two Cat6 points as well. It's not a well-lit spot and with the 3m height, not sure what's suitable there to capture people coming to the front door?
The front door is towards the right of the porch and one of the network points is on the left and another on the right. The one on the right is literally looking down at top of people's heads when they're standing in front of the door.



The right side I was thinking one cam to cover the gate area and another pointed down the corridor.


Three cams to cover the rear. It's closer to 4m from ground to eaves due to slope of the land.


One cam to cover the garage rear



Internally also looking to install ~4 cameras to cover the main entrances.

Based on what I've seen so far, I'm headed towards the IPC-HDW5231R-ZE, which are the cameras used above in the calculator.

Please let me know your thoughts on the above and if other mounting locations make more sense.

Thank you.

 

[mat200]

Hello,

We've recently completed construction of our new house and I'm looking to get some IP cameras installed. I asked the sparky to pre-wire Cat6 cables at a few locations around the house. POE will be provided by a 250W Ubiquiti Unifi switch. I was initially looking at their G3 Pro cams until I ran into this forum and the wiki

Details:
1. Front of house is 32m across, and ~8m to the footpath.
2. Left side of house flush against the fence.
3. Right side of house has ~2m wide corridor, with side gate.
4. Rear of the house is 16m across, and 6m to the fence.
5. Corridor at the rear of the garage.

Eaves height is 3m.
...

Welcome @NimitzHarrington

Congratulations on your new home build, it is always nice to get a new place.

Did you get pictures of the build out before the walls were put up?

3M ( 10 feet for USA folks ) is typically far too high of a mount point for cameras... wished you stopped by here before you had sparky run any lines, as I strongly suspect that you may have underestimated the number of cameras you may want to get the coverage you want - and may have placed the cable runs to locations which are not ideal. ( this is why testing is so important ).

Typically when building out a home
1) PLAN and TEST positions before the walls get closed up.
2) Over cable while it is easy... you often will want at least 1-2 more cameras than you initially thought.
3) Buy a good varifocal camera to test with.

Please See the cliff notes for more

Note: For those reading this and building new homes - see the notes right away and plan to start testing once the framing gets put up.

 

[NimitzHarrington]

Thanks @mat200. Yes the sparky did comment on my original camera locations request that there weren't enough so we added a few more together. He didn't mention the height issue though but I guess that's not really his specialty. Fortunately he left quite a bit of cable length around so I do have some headroom to move the camera locations. At the time I was more concerned about not having the cameras within reachable height to prevent vandalism so hence placing them underneath the eaves.

I do have photos of different phases of the build as we visited the site often. Were you after the ones pre-plaster?

At this point I'm just tempted to get an IPC-HDW5231R-ZE from Andy's shop to test with and see how things go. I was tempted by the 4MP version but appears it's not available. Would the 5231R-ZE be a good varifocal camera to test with?

 

[mat200]

Thanks @mat200. ..At the time I was more concerned about not having the cameras within reachable height to prevent vandalism so hence placing them underneath the eaves.
.. Would the 5231R-ZE be a good varifocal camera to test with?

Hi @NimitzHarrington

Good news that you had extra drops installed! That will help out a lot. Also good to have some extra slack - if you need to you can drop down a bit with a section of conduit and a junction box. ( I would recommend considering this in cases where the cameras are mounted too high ). One option is to use cameras which you set to zoom out a bit more to get a better angle on a face. ( use the varifocal model to test which places you can use to zoom in.. see the DORI chart, in the USA we use the specs of 100 ppf ( pixel per feet ) for ID requirements - that iirc is about 330 pixel per meter.

Q: Would the 5231R-ZE be a good varifocal camera to test with?
A: Yes, that would be a good choice - as imho that is worth keeping in your mix of cameras.

Re: Height vs vandalism.
Typically the cameras need to be within reach of potential vandals to do their job to help get good ID images. Just like a policeman needs to do foot patrols in bad neighborhoods to make friends with those who may want to report crime. When the police just drive by and do not get out of their cars then the citizens do not form relationships with them which can help reduce crime.

 

[NimitzHarrington]

Thanks @mat200. I will get one of the camera specified above so I can start testing.

 

[YYZed]

Hi @NimitzHarrington

Good news that you had extra drops installed! That will help out a lot. Also good to have some extra slack - if you need to you can drop down a bit with a section of conduit and a junction box. ( I would recommend considering this in cases where the cameras are mounted too high ). One option is to use cameras which you set to zoom out a bit more to get a better angle on a face. ( use the varifocal model to test which places you can use to zoom in.. see the DORI chart, in the USA we use the specs of 100 ppf ( pixel per feet ) for ID requirements - that iirc is about 330 pixel per meter.

Q: Would the 5231R-ZE be a good varifocal camera to test with?
A: Yes, that would be a good choice - as imho that is worth keeping in your mix of cameras.

Re: Height vs vandalism.
Typically the cameras need to be within reach of potential vandals to do their job to help get good ID images. Just like a policeman needs to do foot patrols in bad neighborhoods to make friends with those who may want to report crime. When the police just drive by and do not get out of their cars then the citizens do not form relationships with them which can help reduce crime.

Absolutely agreed about the height, but I don't need to echo what has been said constantly on here. I got over worrying about vandalism because honestly, these cameras aren't expensive. If someone wants to mess with them, then have at it. I've likely caught them in the act anyways. I'm in the middle of a 16 camera build and the two I just mounted today are at the top edge of my garage door. That's within arms reach for a 6' tall person. My front door camera is mounted at forehead height, so about 5'9 ish.

I'm glad to read you have placed cabling for more cameras, because from your original post with the maps I would agree that you had underestimated. That's coming from someone who is a total noob to this, but I found out very quickly in my testing and research what the realistic capability of these cameras really is. 14 cameras around the perimeter and 2 in the garage will JUST get it done for me, and I wish I had the infrastructure to do more.

 

[ThomasPI]

Agreed, we just closed on our construction loan yesterday. I’m also looking at 16 cameras with 3 of those on the inside. We’re running Cat 6 everywhere.

 

[NimitzHarrington]

Thanks @YYZed and @ThomasPI. Fortunately I have some slack to play with to drop the cables lower then. We ran Cat6 everywhere as well.

 

[NimitzHarrington]

Hi all,

Just to confirm. The cameras with model codes starting with IPC are Dahua cameras and IPCT are the IP Cam Talk branded ones?

I was just going to get them through Andy's shop on Aliexpress as I'm in Australia.

Thanks.