New Install - What to buy?

[ravetildon]

Just bought a new ranch. place is roughly 400 feet wide by 1300 feet long. 13 or so acres. Have 5 barns and a house I want to watch. Prob 4 cams per building. Plus I want to watch the road. So prob looking at at least 30 cameras. A lot of the area is cement, so it would be really hard to lay wire. Right now I have nothing. No computer, router, cameras, etc.

Anyone have any suggestions on what to buy? Def want full HD and want good night vision. Ideally I'd like WIFI cameras, but from what I read here that's a bad idea? Is it doable? What's the best way to cover such a large area? I'd hate to run a computer and router in each building. What a good way to get these up and going without breaking the bank?

FYI: Some buildings have no power, so I will prob have to run them off a battery and solar panel - so that might make POE not work?
Something I could use arduino/raspberry pi for?
Best way to get all the buildings interconnected?
I'd also like to record to a wireless remote hard drive in case thieves find the computer that's running all this so they can't take all the recording data.

4 cams will be on a road with cars traveling 60 MPH. So they will need a high FPS and I'd like 2 of them to be located to capture license plates.

 

[fenderman]

Welcome to the forum. You will need to do a lot of reading first. There is no way you will be able to do 30 HD cams via wifi without an insane budge. Solar is a whole new issue, but there is no reason you cant use poe if you set it up properly. How far are the barns from a power source? You may be best off running cable, its the most reliable and cheapest way to go. What is your budget? There are very few good quality cameras with built in wifi. The primary issue is your budget...

 

[ravetildon]

I install solar so that isn't an issue. 500 feet from power. I'd have to put in utility poles. couldn't go underground with power. Not sure about my budget. One way or another it's got to get done. my place has been broken into multiple times and I just moved in... basically whatever it takes I'm going to do.

Why i dont want to run wires is I don't want the thieves to cut em. I had a swann wired system set up, they cut all the wires and stole the dvr. After that I set up some hunting cams. They found those and stole those as well.

 

[fenderman]

The best way to combat NVR theft is to use camera with built in SD cards. The camera will still record to NVR but have the SD card as a backup. http://www.hikvision.com/en/products_show.asp?id=9446 is a good example. There is a wifi version as well, you need to specify wifi. Regardless, 30 wifi HD cameras is a HUGE project and i promise you will have issues. Here is what you do, for each barn use a 8 port switch with 4 poe, and hard wire the cameras. Then run a singe cable back to the nearest barn then to the next all the way back to the house. Even if they cut that cable the cameras will still record to SD and they will still have power. Remember that max length between switches cannot exceed 100 meters.

 

[ravetildon]

In the last install the thieves took the cameras...

How will POE travel thru solar? I can't run 500 feet of power cable. too much loss and that thick of cable too much money. Plus I have to buy multiple 30' poles to mount the cables to each barn since I cant run cable underground.

100 meters? I'm 500 feet from power or anything else. So that already fails.

 

[Ecko404]

In the last install the thieves took the cameras...

How will POE travel thru solar? I can't run 500 feet of power cable. too much loss and that thick of cable too much money. Plus I have to buy multiple 30' poles to mount the cables to each barn since I cant run cable underground.

100 meters? I'm 500 feet from power or anything else. So that already fails.

These are great products to create long range wireless bridge:

http://www.ubnt.com/airmax/nanostationm/

Just need power. Solar is the way to go. I would do this setup:

Solar panel / charge controller / battery / AC power converter;

UBNT poe switch (with ports to power the bridge and the cameras)

Plug the switch into AC power.

Then do this setup:
Nanostation (with dual ethernet port) main ethernet port (POE input) cat5e to switch.
poe switch -> then lay cat5e cable for each cameras.

Sorry for the multiple post/delete I keep making errors.

 

[paarlberg]

I have used these in the past.

http://www.engeniustech.com/business-networking/outdoor-access-points-client-bridges/9340-enh500-

They work great and you can do up to 100mbps on them. I have run my cable internet connection (30/4 and 60/4) between houses as well and there was no difference in speed. They run about $160 per pair and are very stable. You would need a pair per barn, you might be able to link barn to barn then a single pair to the main house. I would prefer to have 2 uplinks vs 1 to the main house in case they kill one link, you will have the redundant one still up.

This is a speed test I did on the link, you can see the burst near the end of the graph.










This is the running usage on the link for several months, I decommissioned it in March when I moved into the new house. That is a 1-day average over the period.












Then in each barn, you could do the following

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833704080

Then pick your cameras, the hikvision 3MP turrets, or bullets will work well and are affordable for each barn. Street side will be a much larger investment.

Since you have active theft, you would want some kind of monitoring in place for lost signal to cams and for motion detection.

I would also consider a UPS at each barn, killing the power won't knock you off line and a 1500va UPS would probably run for a couple hours with the wireless, poe switch and cams.

With that many cams, not sure if Blue Iris would make sense from a hardware requirement stand point.

You may also want to consider a camera with a higher zoom (20-30x) if you have line of sight from the main house to cover some of the barns. I would definitely hang the cameras as high as possible and hide all wiring to prevent easy access for criminals.

If the theft is inside the barns, you might be better off having a couple cams inside to capture them there. Maybe 50% of the outside cams being dummy cams. Try to distract them from the real ones, then they might waste some time with a dummy cam.

If we had a rough layout of the property, might have some good camera location suggestions.

 

[ravetildon]

Any suggestions for lost signal and motion detection?
What would be a better solution then blue iris?
Any ideas on the highway cams?

Since you have active theft, you would want some kind of monitoring in place for lost signal to cams and for motion detection.
With that many cams, not sure if Blue Iris would make sense from a hardware requirement stand point.

 

[paarlberg]

The cameras I mentioned have basic motion detection built in. I know Blue Iris will notify you of any loss in connection (you set the thresholds), some others might do the same thing.

Is the street an issue to be concerned about? You might be able to monitor anything from the street to the buildings instead.

 

[fenderman]

If they have time to take the cameras you need a proper alarm system to notify you of the break in. Its not easy to remove 30 vandal resistant domes quickly.

 

[ravetildon]

I didn't have internet access at the home before. So it was a bit of an issue with them taking the DVR. I sorta have internet their. It's super spotty (wireless) and I'm in the middle of no where. So hopefully the system is good at "fixing" itself after it loses the connection and comes back up again. Whne the place was broken into, apparently they were their "all day" packing my stuff up. Yea, random people should not even be going down my LONG driveway. Anyone using it is scouting for something.

 

[fenderman]

Sorry to hear about the all day burglary. But you will need something more than cameras. Like a good alarm system + some way to get notification when someone enters your driveway. You cannot rely on camera motion for alters because you will get too many false triggers that will drive you nuts. Alarm systems are easy to install and relatively cheap.

 

[ravetildon]

Yea, I have one of the off the shelf Swann systems at my other property. It goes off all the time. I set up a separate email just for that video system because of that. This house if full of tall grass, trees & lots of wild animals that would probable set it off even worse. Figured I'd set up a zone or something. Maybe one camera inside where I get a special alert or one at the front door wiht a small field of view.

def need some kind of alarm as well. ideally one that will turn all camera on if a trigger happens. Right now I just need to get some cams up... Know any that don't have the monthly monitoring fee?

 

[fenderman]

You can get very cheap monitoring via alarmrelay.com or self monitor. Alarm relay is only like 10 a month or so....you are about to drop 5+ grand on a 30 cam system so that shouldnt even be an issue.
You can attached PIR sensors to many cameras that have an alarm in connection. Also for indoors and covered outdoor locations the hikvision 2432 3mp cube has a built in PIR sensor.

 

[ravetildon]

Just not a big fan of monthly payment, but may have to. Do you know if ALARMRELAY is an always on phone connection? Is the connection via cell phone, hard wired phone line or WIFI? I know a lot of the residential system the phone line isn't connected 24/7. So for companies like ADT is all a criminal has to do is clip the phone line and the alarm company will never be notified. Not sure how many people know this, but it kind of sucks they do that for residential systems. or for a GSM system, just run a phone jammer while they are doing breaking into the house. The system will never alert anyone..

 

[fenderman]

check out the website, you can use cellular, landline, or internet. Its not that easy to jam the alarm .There are some more expensive systems that continuously communicate with the central station and if they lose the connections it triggers an alarm. If the thieves are able to bypass all of that then you need an armed guard or build a compound fence. 99.9% of criminals dont use jammers or cut lines.

 

[fenderman]

Another option you have if you are very concerned about NVR and camera theft is to install a few hidden cameras with SD cards in a wall or ac vent etc.
Hikvision has a new model http://wrightwoodsurveillance.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_91&products_id=382
or the LTS version contact @milkisbad http://www.ltsecurityinc.com/en_us/product/1293.html
These are available with a pinhole lens. Put them at choke points. They will never find it.