Vacant home: cameras or security system?

[dmcIPCAM]

Unless its someone you know, you risk them refusing to leave when the house is sold. Its also easier to show the house when its vacant.

'Fairly big problem': Squatters invade homes and refuse to leave. How is this legal?

Squatting is not a particularly difficult problem to solve. It simply requires police and prosecutors to enforce existing laws.

www.usatoday.com

This happened a few years back to a house in our neighborhood. Owners lived in Oregon in summer and Arizona in winter. They
had bought the house from someone who used to rent rooms, but they apparently never changed the locks. Former room
renter drives by one day during the winter, still has old house key, checks door, moves in, changes door locks. As I understand,
it took more than a year to get the squatters out. After they were evicted I helped a guy carry some lumber inside: house was
completely trashed.

 

[Lucian]

A camera system is not a replacement for an alarm. Screw adt, they will lock you in buy a ring alarm for from costco or amazon for 200 bux and you are done. pay monthly for the monitoring and added cellular backup. This is a temp solution might as well add 2 indoor ring or wyze cameras for visual confirmation - wifi will be fine for this tiny application. You dont want a squatter in there.

Surety diy.com. Alarm.com. Easy install. Cheap . Take it with you when done. Ring works well.

 

[kjinxx2]

I just happened to flip over to Amazon's site when putting together an order - I was reading a review and the two embedded price widgets showed the base outdoor cam at $99 (ring store) and $59 (amazon) - and it looks like there's some early prime day specials, so this bundle just got more affordable.

As to housesitting, hell, I'd go down there for a few months if my wife and I didn't have so many medical things going on right now, but yeah, there's not really anyone I'd fully trust that's already down there, and we had an offer to housesit or rent at below market and I'd jump at that if it was someone I personally knew, but this person was extremely shady about it, so...

Sounds to me like you have more than enough reason to get surveillance & alarm installed ASAP - seems like you've already got some shadiness scoping it out

 

[sporkman]

I just happened to flip over to Amazon's site when putting together an order - I was reading a review and the two embedded price widgets showed the base outdoor cam at $99 (ring store) and $59 (amazon) - and it looks like there's some early prime day specials, so this bundle just got more affordable.

So at $600, which is not too far off from the Reolink camera system (no alarm) I was looking at, I can have the following:

• ring doorbell (this is more of a "for the next owner" thing, plus on sale for $59 w/a 5" screen/echo "show")
• two solar outdoor cams in the front
• 4 indoor cams (one for back patio, one for the wing w/3 bedrooms, one for master bed where stuff is getting stored, one for family room area, one for front entrance hall - these are all currently $29, so...)
• 4 motion sensors (covers all rooms w/sliding doors and bedroom wing)
• 4 door/window sensors (front door, door to garage from house, normal door out from garage, and rigging one to the actual garage door - these are all bundled w/the alarm)
• alarm "pro" (bundled, but is down to $179 on its own, bundle also includes one of the z-wave extenders)
• first month of monitoring

I'm also grabbing a bunch of micro-usb extensions for those indoor cams and some white gaffer's tape. I opted for the "pro" version of the base due to it having backup cell connectivity...

Too much? Too little?

I also have seen lots of real estate listings around my area touting various self-install security devices as a bonus, so maybe in a roundabout way it will at least partially pay for itself.

 

[sporkman]

Also quick one on "smart home" stuff in general... I do like the idea of having control of some lights, etc. - I'm aware of most vendors having Alexa integration, but is there anything that directly talks with the Ring stuff or is that all folded in to Amazon/Alexa at this point?

 

[dudemaar]

I have a Schlage smart connect dead bolt connected to my ring app.

 

[sporkman]

Well, placed an order, ended up around $700, which includes a bunch of little extras for the indoor cameras and such. Will be heading down there to install later this week!

 

[Tygunn]

Well, placed an order, ended up around $700, which includes a bunch of little extras for the indoor cameras and such. Will be heading down there to install later this week!

I think you'll be happy with that combo of equipment. It IS possible to get false triggers from motion sensors (rare, but it happens). When I was overseas on a vacation recently my Abode alarm triggered for motion in the living room -- I was able to quickly VPN in to my BI server and check all my cameras and confirm nothing was amiss (although amazingly the local PD stopped by to check it out as well!). The peace of mind of SEEING what is going on is definitely worth it.

Which reminds me, I need to find some suitably small cameras for inside the house for rough visual confirmation of indoor conditions when I'm out.

 

[sporkman]

Which reminds me, I need to find some suitably small cameras for inside the house for rough visual confirmation of indoor conditions when I'm out.

FWIW, the Ring indoor cams are on sale for $30/each...

 

[SIR VEYOR]

Wasnt meant to be my first post, but…

What about using “Alfred” on a few cellphones running off the WiFi?

And probably something similar but better is out from when I looked at that option…

 

[sporkman]

Wow, it's been a long time, but just want to thank everyone here who helped me narrow things down and especially steered me to an actual alarm system instead of just cameras.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the system. I've had the cops out twice. First was I forgot that one of the neighbors had a key and she came over to check that things were locked up properly and the hurricane shutters were down and she triggered the alarm (and talked the cops out of doing anything somehow). The second was a totally phantom motion sensor trigger. I still need to poke around the settings and see if I can make it not go right to CALL THE COPS on one sensor trigger...

Pros:

• Pretty cheap! Both upfront and monitoring.
• Backup internet via built-in cell modem is a nice perk on the "pro" version or whatever they call it, and backup data is included in the monitoring fee.
• Big surprise with one of the outdoor stick-up cams - I bought the little solar panel and it works extremely well, every time I check the battery level it's 100% (of course this is Florida so...). If you had to do a bunch of outdoor cams and running cabling was an issue, the solar power option seems great.
• The phone app is not too bad, and kind of handy to have geofencing for auto-arm and such, or being able to disarm the alarm if you forget the keypad code.
• The picture quality on the cams I got for $30 is surprisingly good.
• I'm not there obviously, but so far I've not had any devices lock-up, freeze, etc. which might be less of a big deal if you live in the home, but if you have no way to remotely power-cycle an AC-powered camera, so I'm happy they've not gone wonky.
• WiFi coverage on the eero portion of the alarm base is really good.

Cons:

• Like I think most wireless systems, you can't have recordings going 24/7, but does that really matter if you're just trying to catch a face after someone is already in the house? Probably not.
• The double-stick tape supplied with the motion sensors seems a bit janky - even after cleaning the walls before sticking the motion sensors up I woke up one morning (day before I left) to a few of them triggered and laying on the ground. I re-mounted them with screws.
• Motion detection on the stick-up cams seems a little janky, and you can't exclude areas that are causing false alerts.
• WiFi for the cams works, but as many others have said on here, the compression is just nuts, so placement of the cameras is important - don't think you'll see a face from across the room or yard.
• Motion trigger delays on the cameras is kind of annoying - on the outside cams it's repeatedly missed faces when someone hangs a tag on the front door.
• If you're in an area with spotty cell coverage or your alarm base station is in a bad spot in your home, I worry that without local storage you might not get all your video up to the cloud...

Anyhow, thanks again everyone! Nice community you have here, wish I had more reason to hang out.

 

[Ri22o]

Wow, it's been a long time, but just want to thank everyone here who helped me narrow things down and especially steered me to an actual alarm system instead of just cameras.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the system. I've had the cops out twice. First was I forgot that one of the neighbors had a key and she came over to check that things were locked up properly and the hurricane shutters were down and she triggered the alarm (and talked the cops out of doing anything somehow). The second was a totally phantom motion sensor trigger. I still need to poke around the settings and see if I can make it not go right to CALL THE COPS on one sensor trigger...

Pros:

• Pretty cheap! Both upfront and monitoring.
• Backup internet via built-in cell modem is a nice perk on the "pro" version or whatever they call it, and backup data is included in the monitoring fee.
• Big surprise with one of the outdoor stick-up cams - I bought the little solar panel and it works extremely well, every time I check the battery level it's 100% (of course this is Florida so...). If you had to do a bunch of outdoor cams and running cabling was an issue, the solar power option seems great.
• The phone app is not too bad, and kind of handy to have geofencing for auto-arm and such, or being able to disarm the alarm if you forget the keypad code.
• The picture quality on the cams I got for $30 is surprisingly good.
• I'm not there obviously, but so far I've not had any devices lock-up, freeze, etc. which might be less of a big deal if you live in the home, but if you have no way to remotely power-cycle an AC-powered camera, so I'm happy they've not gone wonky.
• WiFi coverage on the eero portion of the alarm base is really good.

Cons:

• Like I think most wireless systems, you can't have recordings going 24/7, but does that really matter if you're just trying to catch a face after someone is already in the house? Probably not.
• The double-stick tape supplied with the motion sensors seems a bit janky - even after cleaning the walls before sticking the motion sensors up I woke up one morning (day before I left) to a few of them triggered and laying on the ground. I re-mounted them with screws.
• Motion detection on the stick-up cams seems a little janky, and you can't exclude areas that are causing false alerts.
• WiFi for the cams works, but as many others have said on here, the compression is just nuts, so placement of the cameras is important - don't think you'll see a face from across the room or yard.
• Motion trigger delays on the cameras is kind of annoying - on the outside cams it's repeatedly missed faces when someone hangs a tag on the front door.
• If you're in an area with spotty cell coverage or your alarm base station is in a bad spot in your home, I worry that without local storage you might not get all your video up to the cloud...

Anyhow, thanks again everyone! Nice community you have here, wish I had more reason to hang out.

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You should be able to set it to cancel any calls if you manually cancel any alarm via the keypad or the app. This would give you time to review and see if the alarm event was true or not. Not sure what to do if you find it was an actual event though and need to re-initiate the emergency call.

You can't record 24/7, but you should be able to set up snapshots and have a sort of time lapse through the day. The upside is you can likely set most of them to max sensitivity for recording and only set the main cameras for alerts.