Why DIY Security Camera Kits Usually Disappoint

Boxed camera kits are not badly made. The cameras usually produce a decent picture on the bench and the app does what the packaging says it will.

What disappoints people is the result at their own house six months later. That gap is almost always the installation rather than the hardware.

• Cameras up too high because that was where a ladder reached
• A cable run that had to be abandoned, so a camera went on wifi instead
• A night picture nobody checked until the night it mattered
• Motion alerts left on factory settings and then switched off entirely a week later
• A recorder placed in a sealed cupboard with no air around it
• A hard drive that quietly stopped writing months ago with nothing to announce it

None of those are faults with the product. They are decisions made on the day with a ladder in one hand and a set of instructions written for no house in particular.

The part of a camera install that takes the time is getting a cable from the recorder to each camera position without anything showing on the outside of the house. In a Perth double brick home that means the roof space.

It is hot, tight and full of things you do not want to put a foot through. It is also where the decisions get made about whether a camera can go where you wanted it.

• A tiled roof is reasonably easy to move through, so positions stay fairly open
• A low pitch Colorbond roof is a crawl, and cameras end up where a person can physically reach
• Roof space temperatures in a Perth summer are punishing, which is why cable pulling gets done early in the day
• Eave sheeting on homes built before the late 1980s may contain asbestos, which should not be drilled
• Two storey homes usually have no roof space above the ground floor, so lower cameras need a wall cavity or a hidden external run
• Flat and skillion roofs with no crawl space mean conduit, which wants painting to match the wall so it stops being the first thing you see
• Insulation, downlights, air conditioning ducting and old wiring all have to be worked around rather than through

When the run gets too hard, the usual DIY outcome is a compromise. Either the cable comes down the outside of the wall in white conduit, or the camera moves to wifi and inherits every wifi problem.

The most common kit install mistake is height. Cameras go up as high as the ladder allows, because that feels safer and looks tidier from the street.

A camera in a two storey gable records your roof tiles and the crown of a head. The same camera at roughly two and a half metres records a face you could identify somebody from.

Aim is the other half. Steeply angled down gives you the top of everything, and the lens should look along the path a person walks with only enough tilt to keep the ground in frame.

Cameras earn their keep after dark, and a night picture is much less forgiving than a daytime one. An angle that looks perfect at two in the afternoon can be unusable at two in the morning.

None of that shows up during a Saturday afternoon install. It shows up on the first dark night, by which point the holes are drilled and the brackets are in.

The quiet failure of a kit system is that it does not tell you when it is not working. You keep believing you are covered right up to the moment you go looking.

• A wifi camera that loses signal simply stops recording, and nothing marks the gap in the timeline
• Battery cameras are offline while they charge, and the one covering the back shed is the one most often forgotten
• Motion triggered recording starts when the movement is detected, so the first second or two of an event is already gone
• A failing hard drive can shrink your history from a fortnight to a day without any announcement
• Cloud stored footage disappears with the subscription if you stop paying
• An app that stopped connecting after your provider replaced the modem looks fine until you try to check in from somewhere else

Continuous recording to a drive at your house avoids most of that, because there is nothing to trigger and no signal to drop. The habit worth building either way is pulling up footage from a few days ago once a month to prove the system is still doing its job.

Factory alert settings are the fastest way to make a camera system useless. Straight out of the box a camera reacts to any movement anywhere in its view.

That means the road, the footpath, the neighbour's driveway, moths around the infrared, spider webs across the lens and plants moving in the afternoon sea breeze. Within a week the notifications are off and nobody looks at the app.

• Mask everything past your own boundary so the street stops triggering the camera
• Switch to person and vehicle detection rather than any change in the picture
• Set alerts to the times that matter instead of all day
• Choose which cameras alert at all, since the patio you are sitting on does not need to
• Clean the housings, because infrared draws insects and insects draw spiders
• Trim the branch that has grown into the driveway view before it sets things off all night

Tuning the alerts takes patience and it is the difference between a system you glance at daily and one you ignore. It is worth the time on the day the system goes in.

Owning a kit that never worked properly is a common starting point, and it does not mean the money is wasted. Quite often there is something worth keeping.

1. 1

   Find out what is still recording

   Pull up footage from three days ago on every camera. Anything that cannot produce it is not doing the job you think it is.

2. 2

   Check the night view on each camera

   Check every camera after dark rather than in daylight. Glare and black holes are far more common than people expect.

3. 3

   Work out which positions are wrong

   Too high, aimed too steeply down, or looking at a wall. Some cameras can simply be moved and become useful.

4. 4

   See whether the cable can be reused

   If somebody managed a run through the roof space, that labour is already paid for and often stays even when the cameras are replaced.

5. 5

   Keep the wireless cameras for indoor spots

   A wifi camera that struggles at the back fence can be perfectly good in a hallway or a garage close to the modem.

6. 6

   Have the rest assessed properly

   An upgrade around what already works is a much smaller job than starting from nothing, and it should be quoted that way.

We take over systems other people installed, including hardware store kits, and we will tell you plainly which parts are worth keeping. The quote comes in writing after somebody has inspected what is there.