I want a 2 x Camera’s on the corner of the house and would quite like to use Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales.  I prefer they worked of a mains supply (I think) and will ask an electrician to wire them in.

Whats good?

Thanks

Swann or Lorex – Wired. Dead easy to fit. You just need a place for the PVR then chase the wires to the cameras, and a wifi/LAN connection (I used a mains WIFI LAN extender).. Or you could go IP cameras.  Loads of options.

we sell hikvision and maxx one.  in all the flavours.

both are good.

I use Hikvision cameras in our fields to keep an eye on our sheep. They are POE (power over ethernet) so you just need to run some Cat-5 or Cat-6 network cable from your POE enabled router or POE enabled recorder. No need for an electrician.

Have three Hikvision cameras here an have been pretty impressed by them so far. Reliable and excellent image quality. Easy to set up DIY (mine are installed using CAT6 PoE) and do pretty much what I wanted them for. The smartphone app works well and is my primary means of us, although as I WFH, I often have the camera view up on a spare monitor so I can see the postman coming up the drive!

If I had to fault them, it would be because they false-trigger far too often, no matter how carefully I set them up or how much I fettle the settings. I’ve ended up disabling the smart motion detection in favour of line crossing instead, which still false triggers, but less so than before.

On the other hand, if you want to detect pigeons…

Hikvision darkfighter or Dahua starlight

Worth it for night time details

Another vote for hikvision IP cameras here, no need to faff about with mains supply and transformers for each camera etc, just cat 5 from camera to recorder. Although also echo that the auto detection triggers far too easily, just go with a continuous record

Thanks – the Hikvision looks good.  I didn’t really need the Alarm but as one would be facing the rear/bike storage I’m guessing I could have the line detection on a person sized thing (we have cats) set overnight only?

I’m assuming continuous record overwrites when the media storage runs out?

Also – forgive me I am of little knowledge of these things, but an electrician would be able to do the cable work?   I’m assuming (in my case the cameras would be sited just under the eaves, where there is already access through to the loft which has power, and would be where the box sits?   And then, I just hook up to the internet to approaches to the front & back?

For Hikvision, the easiest way to set it up is to buy one of their NVRs (a box with a hard disk in it) and this also will do the PoE power injection. You then just run one cat5/6 cable from each camera back to this box, stick an RJ45 plug on each end, and plug the cameras into the back of the box which will both power the cameras and talk to them for configuration etc.. Then you’d have a single network link to your home network and, through this, onwards to the internet. Once you’ve done this, you configure everything through the NVR and rarely, if ever, connect directly to the cameras.

Regarding disk space, yes, you can set it up to record 24/7 and it will just overwrite continuously. IIRC, I get about one week from a 1TB disk (I should probably buy a bigger one, but this one was lying around!). The event triggers are really just a bonus and, hopefully, give you a chance of catching someone mid-pilfer if it came to it.

Would you be able to run a camera through a Network extender plug thing? If I wanted a camera on the eaves of my garage which is on the same ring main as my house but didn’t want to run any new cat 5 to the garage could I use those network plug things that you use to run internet to the tv through the mains?

Would you be able to run a camera through a Network extender plug thing? If I wanted a camera on the eaves of my garage which is on the same ring main as my house but didn’t want to run any new cat 5 to the garage could I use those network plug things that you use to run internet to the tv through the mains?

Yes, but with a couple of caveats: power line networks tend not be as quick, nor as robust as proper network cabling, so you may find the camera isn’t quite as reliable. Obviously, this will depend on your situation as some are better than others. Also, the power-over-ethernet won’t pass over the powerline network adapters (sounds a bit odd, I know), so you’d need a local power injector in the garage – search for “poe injector” – look to be about £15 for a single ethernet drop.

So it would look a bit like:

NVR <—> power line adapter <—mains—> power line adapter <—> poe injector <—> camera

This would then make this camera look and feel exactly like the others on the NVR. If you wanted to use the network in the garage for other stuff too (e.g. home wifi), you’d need to do it a little differently, with the camera connected directly to your home LAN rather than the magic camera ports on the back of the NVR. You would then manually configure that camera on the NVR which will otherwise work the same. So:

NVR <—> home network <—> power line adapter <—mains—> power line adapter <—poe injector—> camera

(in this case, the normal port for the camera would not be used as the NVR would talk to the camera over the connection normally used to connect the NVR to the network, rather than those used to talk to the cameras)

Does the box connect to the internet wirelessly?   Just wondering if this whole setup will sit nicely in the attic.

Take a look at Reolink IP Cams. I have a RLC-420 covering the outside and 2 RLC-440’s covering inside. Their software is pretty good and the motion sensing is a bit more ‘tunable’. I do have a HikVision covering the shed, as good from an image quality perspective but the motion sensing settingis pretty ‘blunt’ meaning I have hours of footage to delete when the cloud move, etc