Remote Camera

[Tacoman]

I am looking for a camera for a remote area on my property. No power and about 1000ft from my house. I want something real time but a good game camera camera may be ok. My experience with game cameras has not been good. I am hoping the best option is not to lay 1000 feet of wire. It's got to work down to 0degF and up to 105degF.

Thanks for any ideas
John

 

[awahl101]

only thing i can think of is a wireless camera that uses solar as well as has a battery. Hardwiring is always recommended as the camera and directional wap needed would probably equate to the same price and be less reliable.


Not many choices, reolink isnt that great, I own one of their cameras and my cheap dahua blows it out of the water

Reolink Argus 2+Solar Panel | Rechargeable Battery-Powered Security Camera | Outdoor Wireless |1080p HD Wire-Free 2-Way Audio Starlight Color Night Vision w/PIR Motion Sensor & SD Socket

that and a ubiquiti nanostation loco m2

Sent from my LG-LS997 using Tapatalk

 

[mat200]

I am looking for a camera for a remote area on my property. No power and about 1000ft from my house. I want something real time but a good game camera camera may be ok. My experience with game cameras has not been good. I am hoping the best option is not to lay 1000 feet of wire. It's got to work down to 0degF and up to 105degF.

Thanks for any ideas
John

HI John

How about something like this?
Dahua Starlight Varifocal Turret (IPC-HDW5231R-Z)

 

[Tacoman]

The Dahua looks like a great system, but I would have to put together a power supply, transmitter and receiver. That sounds like a lot of work. I wonder if anyone put together a remote package that works the power and communications problems.
On the Reolink the manufacturer say it communicates on wi-fi or what they call "independent". What does independent mean? It think 1000ft is too far for wi-fi.

 

[mat200]

The Dahua looks like a great system, but I would have to put together a power supply, transmitter and receiver. That sounds like a lot of work. I wonder if anyone put together a remote package that works the power and communications problems.
On the Reolink the manufacturer say it communicates on wi-fi or what they call "independent". What does independent mean? It think 1000ft is too far for wi-fi.

HI @Tacoman

There are professional packages that have all the power and communications all set for someone to deploy the kits .. they will cost you some significant $$$, thus why a lot of us here end up assembling things ourselves.

In terms of consumer grade wifi products - I doubt you will find any packaged solution which readily meets your 1000ft comm requirement.

 

[tangent]

You'll need:

• Solar Panel(s)
• Charge controller / MPPT
• Power supply to provide more stable power (could be integrated in MPPT/Charger)
• Batteries
• 2 long range wifi devices (one for the house, one for the remote location), some may require PoE for power.
• Camera you want to use, you may want to consider some other models.
  • They have a few cameras targeted at transportation markets that are more tolerant of voltage variation
• Cables, wiring, some kind of NEMA enclosure.
• Hardware to mount the solar panels

To figure out some of this, a bit of math is required.
You need to know a few few things:
what the solar irradiance is for your location so you can estimate the amount of power you'll be able to generate and how many cloudy days you want to plan on. (some websites give kWh/m^2 based on location which works too)
The power consumption of your camera and networking hardware, power supplies (efficiency), etc.

Once you figure some of this out you can calculate how many watts or meters of solar panel are required and the capacity of battery required.
You're roughly in the $300-700 range for everything you'd need to do solar excluding the camera ($100-200) and wifi ($100+), but your location is a factor here.

You should also consider the option of a high end PTZ like the SD6AL245U-HNI-IR with lots of zoom or a fixed ultra zoom like the SDZW2030S-N (which probably doesn't have enough zoom)
The cost of a high end PTZ may be competitive if you have visual line of sight on the area.

 

[GCoco]

You have many choices none real cheap due to the distance.

You can set up solar panels and batteries and use Ubiquiti radios such as M5. No trenching, but expensive and depending where you live the battery may die at times.

You can run 1000’ of UG romex and use Ubiquiti M5 radios. Simplest solution and not too costly. 14awg is plenty big enough since you will have very little load. You do need a housing for the POE incjectors.

You can run UG romex and fiber. Fiber is expensive and you again need a housing for injector and converter.

You can run UG romex and UG ethernet. You need to have separation of the AC and the ethernet as well as multiple repeaters. So multiple housings.

I personally would go with the romex and radios since I had the same situation but only 500 feet.

 

[tangent]

You have many choices none real cheap due to the distance.

You can set up solar panels and batteries and use Ubiquiti radios such as M5. No trenching, but expensive and depending where you live the battery may die at times.

You can run 1000’ of UG romex and use Ubiquiti M5 radios. Simplest solution and not too costly. 14awg is plenty big enough since you will have very little load. You do need a housing for the POE incjectors.

You can run UG romex and fiber. Fiber is expensive and you again need a housing for injector and converter.

You can run UG romex and UG ethernet. You need to have separation of the AC and the ethernet as well as multiple repeaters. So multiple housings.

I personally would go with the romex and radios since I had the same situation but only 500 feet.

You may also be able to use powerline networking devices. Underground romex is called UF cable.

 

[Tacoman]

To install it per code (including limiting voltage drop to less than 3%) with a 5amp breaker (available?) would require #4 romex UF (which is probably not available either). I could not find any #4 romex, but I suspect it is a couple of dollars a foot. Even ignoring codes and using #12 or 14 UF is running $500. Everything else on the house is per code so I don't really want to cross that bridge. Burying it will be another challenge. After the inputs from the forum and more thinking on my part I am going to write off the hard wire idea as unworkable.

Does anyone know how much power an IP camera will actually draw? I looked at those Ubiquiti units and they are impressive. There were reports claiming 1 mile range line of sight. I have to deal with a low hill so it is not quite line of sight but they may work at 1000ft. I may be able to use something battery/solar powered or just a couple of large lead acid batteries. The place gets a lot of snow and we are down to 8 hours of sun a day. Solar panels may not be practical.

After all is said and done, it may be best to use couple of high end game cameras. I had a game camera in another area and it was just about useless.

 

[fenderman]

To install it per code (including limiting voltage drop to less than 3%) with a 5amp breaker (available?) would require #4 romex UF (which is probably not available either). I could not find any #4 romex, but I suspect it is a couple of dollars a foot. Even ignoring codes and using #12 or 14 UF is running $500. Everything else on the house is per code so I don't really want to cross that bridge. Burying it will be another challenge. After the inputs from the forum and more thinking on my part I am going to write off the hard wire idea as unworkable.

Does anyone know how much power an IP camera will actually draw? I looked at those Ubiquiti units and they are impressive. There were reports claiming 1 mile range line of sight. I have to deal with a low hill so it is not quite line of sight but they may work at 1000ft. I may be able to use something battery/solar powered or just a couple of large lead acid batteries. The place gets a lot of snow and we are down to 8 hours of sun a day. Solar panels may not be practical.

After all is said and done, it may be best to use couple of high end game cameras. I had a game camera in another area and it was just about useless.

You dont have to run romex. You can run ethernet and use dahua epoe camera and switch. https://us.dahuasecurity.com/product-technologies/epoe-technology/

 

[tangent]

For a single camera, wifi device, and power supply / poe switch I'd budget around 30 watts. Actual power consumption will often be a bit less.
That equates to 0.25A at 120V. I reckon you're right, to be fully code compliant you'd technically need a breaker that's sized for the load you're using to calculate 3% drop. For ease of installation, you may also want to GFCI protect it so you don't have to bury the cable as deep. There are breakers out there with low current thresholds, but they aren't designed for your average breaker box most likely you'd be looking at something that mounts to a DIN rail.

Re: your hill, you'd likely have to mount the wifi devices higher on one or both ends to overcome it.

Re: running burial rated Ethernet: This can also be done on long runs by adding a PoE powered PoE switch along the way, but e-Poe is simpler. Coax can also be used with e-Poe
Surge suppression on the ethernet cable is very necessary.

 

[Tacoman]

My understanding is POE is only good for 200 or 300ft at best. I am going to look into the EPOE that may be a very good solution. Can they really go out to e 1000ft with cat 5 cable?

 

[Tacoman]

Can they really put 19watts through those tiny wires in Cat5e cable? That doesn't really pass my squint test. Has anyone had any experience?

 

[tangent]

Can they really put 19watts through those tiny wires in Cat5e cable? That doesn't really pass my squint test. Has anyone had any experience?

If you use e-Poe, you'd only have a single camera at the end of the cable. Your typical load would be less than 10 watts.

I'm not certain what voltage e-PoE operates at but normal PoE operates at 48V. Which for a 10W load is 208 mA at 48VDC. All PoE standards also use more than 2 conductors for power.

The basic 802.3af (limited to 13 watts) and 802.3at (limited to 25 watts) standards are technically limited to 100 meters. Some other implementations like ePoE can go further, there are some basic 802.3af switches than can drop to 10Base-T and go significantly farther.

Voltage drop isn't as significant as you might think since the devices using the power are low power and are stepping the voltage down anyway, but you don't wan't to be pulling so much current through the cable that it gets hot . Obviously, on a particularly long cable run, you'd be better off with a camera that draws less power and not some big ptz and cable that's higher a larger awg is desirable (eg. 23awg instead of 24 awg).

 

[Q™]

Install multiple cable...in the event you decide you want more cameras you don't want to dig again!

 

[Tacoman]

tangent: The Dahua epoe is also 48v. I found an online voltage drop calculator. Based on 23awg wire, two conductors in parallel (assuming 4 total wires, like with poe), .25 amp, the voltage drop is about 10% at 1000ft. Significant, but lot less than I would have guessed. The Dahua cameras must be designed to handle the reduced voltage. I suspect the Dahua system may use more than two pairs of conductors.

Q: That is a really good idea. That cable is pretty darn cheap also.

I am beginning to like the idea.

 

[Q™]

I am beginning to like the idea.

No pain, no gain. And digging that trench is gonna be painful brother. But there is a great reward for doing so. I'd suggest you do some research to determine the best cable for the job.

 

[tangent]

Internally, the camera is dropping the 48V PoE to a bunch of voltages 12, 5, 3.3, 1.8, 1.2 may all be present inside the camera.

 

[TonyR]

Insure you use solid copper (not CCA -Copper Clad Aluminum), 23 gauge, Cat-6, rated for outdoor and direct burial such as this from Shireen.

 

[Tacoman]

Thanks for the recommendation cable type. That stuff is a lot more expensive than the indoor stuff. One other thing not to screw up.