Securing Your House Through Cameras

Do you ever wish you could check in on your house to see if a package has been delivered or heard a noise outside and wanted to see what it was without looking out a window?  A couple months ago; Brad installed a security camera DVR system which has allowed me to both check on my house while I am away and also check on the outside while I am home.

This past spring, I had a package disappear from my porch. I had ordered a rug from Urban Outfitters and patiently waited 3 months for the status to move from back-ordered to shipped. I started tracking my UPS package the second the email arrived and willed it to move faster across the country. The day arrived that the site said “out for delivery” and I was anxious to get home and put my pretty new rug in the laundry room. When I arrived home, I went straight to the porch but there was no box, I searched the flower beds, the back deck, and the neighbor’s porch but it couldn’t be found. UPS had delivered it around 11 AM and I arrived home around 6 PM; sometime in those 7 hours my precious rug had been stolen.  Normally, I would be given the option to either receive a refund or receive a new rug; unfortunately the rug that I had waited 3 months for was no longer manufactured so there was no way for me to ever get this rug.

If I had the security cameras back then, I could have seen who took my package, or hopefully deterred them from taking it in the first place. We have strategically placed our cameras so anybody walking up to our front door gets captured a couple different ways.

Camera at the front door

There are many different cameras that can be connected to this DVR system. If you want the cameras disguised there are cameras that look like motion or smoke detectors.  There are also large Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras that can zoom in to read license plates and see facial details.

Our current set-up is an 8 Channel IC Realtime DVR with 3 ICR-200 Cameras; there is also a 4 channel option; however, we have plans to add more cameras in the future so we opted for the larger version.  For somebody looking to add even more cameras there are also 16 and 32 channel versions available.

Besides checking on my packages, I have used the cameras for serious things such as seeing who was at my front door while I was home injured this past summer and also not so serious things like checking to see if it was snowing at my house this winter. We also have a camera located inside the garage so Brad can check to make sure he closed the garage door at night.

The IC Realtime DVRs can be controlled through a remote computer or an app available for Apple and Android. The app is $30 but there are no monthly fees to have this system. Once you buy and install the DVR and cameras they are 100% yours and you don’t have to pay the company to use them. One of the great things about this is that you can build the system as your budget allows.

Since this system is capable of so much I plan on doing a couple more posts about it. If you have a question about the system leave a comment or email me so that I can address it in the next post.