I think my next step on building my system is to add cameras. First objective would be to put one on the corner of my house to see who has come down the driveway and a second on the porch to see who is at the door. I have looked at the Ring cameras but want to know what you peeps recommend.
There’s a whole thread on that… Have a look.
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Kind of mad with the lack of support from SmartThings on Ring cameras other than the doorbell, which only reports as a motion sensor. I have asked Ring and SmartThings. Ring blames SmartThings and SmartThings keeps saying they are working on it.
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I am not pleased with the limited scope of what ST will accept as cameras. Specially, in that they have chosen to only integrate wireless cameras. I have decided it would be best to not even try to merge the two systems for now. I am looking at the Swann camera system now and what remote options I have with that system.
My issue with Ring is they are monty subscription based and I find the video quality from the doorbell sucks. Everything I have read blames this on wifi, but I have confirmed great wifi strength in the area. The wifi access point and doorbell are located 35-ft away, direct line of sight with no obstructions other than the front door framing itself.
I have 2 weeks left to decide if I want to spend $3/mo to keep the live feed and motion recordings service. I certainly will NOT be adding more Ring cameras to this setup.
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I use a Synology NAS with 3 cameras so I have my own 24/7 recording, no other limitations than your storage capacity, alerts via app push and live view, not dependent on the cloud or flaws in ST and awesome customer support.
If you really wanted cloud I would look into Blink. Not officially supported by ST yet but IMO it’s only a matter of time although ST is so unreliable that I don’t see the point, at least when recording 24/7.
Blink has no monthly fee and they are about to add a camera doorbell to their product range for half the price of Ring or Nest.
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Thanks for that. I hate subscription services. I’d rather pay twice as much for hardware that doesn’t require subscriptions. I guess I’ll look elsewhere .
I’m not looking for cloud support.
There are so many different security camera/systems out there that it is truly mind boggling. There are no really good solutions.
I finally ended up with the Netgear Arlo system for several reasons.
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I did not want to pay an electrician hundreds of dollars to install electrical outlets in all the places I wanted to place my cameras. Therefore, I needed cameras with batteries.
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Considered POE cameras but did not want to drill a lot of holes in my walls and under the eaves of my house. I also wanted to use cloud based recordings in case a burglar located/smashed/stole my cameras and/or base unit, I would still have recordings of the incident.
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Arlo is the only company that gives you 7 days of free cloud storage for the first 5 cameras.
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The Arlo Pro system, while still cloud based, does allow for local storage, (the base unit has two USB ports each capable of 2 TB each). Ant it contains a loud siren.
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They have a very nice integration with Smartthings Therefore most sensors that work with Smartthings can be used to trigger video recordings and trigger the siren.
All that being said, I am considering several camera options, as if one failed, the other ones might survive.
Brian
It might be advantageous to have a few recording to the cloud, especially any that would record anyone entering your property. Sure, you can have a few backups that record locally or to a DVR.
With me, I live in St. Louis city, on a city street, so it is kind of hard to get to my house and not have my front yard camera (Ring doorbell) and backyard camera (Ring floodlight) recording you. They record to the cloud so I should have a recording of anyone approaching my house or garage.
If a criminal is smart, they are going to look for a DVR while they are in the house or be smart enough to know that the cameras that record to a local storage card. All they have to do is take those cameras and/or the DVR and the evidence is gone.
Now, of course, Internet connections can fail and power outages can stop these cameras. But, in my particular situation, you would have to cut the power or my Internet connection and you cannot do it at the pole behind my house because I am going to record you doing it and it is not going to be stored locally in my home so I will have the evidence.
I recommend both if you can manage it.
I also recommend PoE cameras if you dislike running power wire. My UPS at my network switch supplies power to all my network AND any PoE devices connected to it.
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@kahilzinger, I agree with you, the best home security starts long before the thief reaches your front door.
Brian
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A lot of brilliant suggestions in that post. I am looking at a local storage solution that will record into hard drive that is rack mounted in a cabinet. If anyone wants to try and steal it, I would love to watch. The thing I like most is the hard drive can actually be ejected from the front panel, so if the thief is smart enough…except that hard drive is my RAID back up for emergency evacuation (live in New Orleans). I have the local hard drive in the server, and another at a different location NAS for remote backup (does my main computer plus laptops).
I am considering offsite backup as well but have not gotten too far into it.
Im in the suburb and I need a lot more cameras to cover all the possible entry points. The downside to this is wireless solutions just are not feasible (initial cost, handling chips, managing wifi traffic, changing batteries or charging the units). POE is the answer for my needs. The plus side is my neighbors also have cameras so we have multiple angles covering side yards. I like the general rule of thumb that a trespasser should never be on fewer than two cameras. When all your neighbors have cameras as well, you not only have multiple cameras but now you also have distributed storage.
I also have powered as many things as I can by POE so I can have the consolidated battery location.