Spec for a CCTV setup - Remote storage?

NutterzUK · 8 Sep 2013 at 21:52

Hi,

Our shed got burgled a couple of weeks ago (boooo!). So, although we have a house alarm (one of those Yale wireless ones), we are looking to buy some CCTV. It's fairly easy to get down the side of the neighbors house and into our garden, and as it's our first house unfortunately it's not the best area.

We have a few requirements, and any help would be really appreciated. I'm fine with technical things as a graduate in Computer Science, but setting up CCTV isn't my forté and I would really appreciate some help.

We can spend up to around £250, and we only need 2 cameras. The issue is that the garden is fairly long and the shed is at the end of it, it would be nice to either have one up there (meaning a long cable) or a high quality camera on the house pointing at it. The other one would go on the front of the house pointing at the drive (and the car).
As for storage, I would rather not wire it into the loft because it's fairly easy to get to, but also because we don't have plug sockets up there. Ideally, i'd like to have the base unit in my office, plugged into the router and streaming the content to some small server set up at my parents house (they are happy for that). I know there will be plenty of systems like that around, but I don't know which is best or where to look. I suppose that isn't 100% essential, but it would really put my mind at ease.

Thanks, again any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

NutterzUK · 8 Sep 2013 at 22:03

Perhaps the loft for the recorder isn't too bad, I guess if the house alarm is going off, nobody is going to want to be going up in to the loft - and this is mainly for the shed up the garden.

Energize · 8 Sep 2013 at 22:44

I'd probably just spend the money on preventing thefts in the first place.

Phantom Shadow · 8 Sep 2013 at 22:50

If you're a graduate in computer science then you'd probably be happy playing around with a raspberry pi. £50 gets you a pi and camera board, can program it to do whatever you want then and the picture quality is pretty good actually. I've got one set up to record 24/7 and transfers the footage to a NAS every hour.

2 cameras makes it £100, plus the server at the parents house if you don't have one for that already. depends on if you wan't a "proper" CCTV system, I'm more than happy with our raspberry pi and it has already provided footage for the police to do with robberies down the road in about a month of it being set up.

Nexus · 8 Sep 2013 at 23:00

Energize said:
I'd probably just spend the money on preventing thefts in the first place.

There is a lot of truth in this statement.

What was taken from your shed?
CCTV while useful, may be fruitless at actually stopping somebody. They then get away with your goods, and even with some footage of varying quality, its not that likely they are going to catch the person and return your goods.

bitslice · 8 Sep 2013 at 23:05

Energize said:
I'd probably just spend the money on preventing thefts in the first place.

+1

You didn't state so I'm assuming the lock was forced?
Proper through-bolted hasps and a shrouded lock would be £25-50.
If they can't break the lock they will rip the walls, door or roof off, suggest reinforcing the shed with plywood and/or additional struts, decent hinges.

A cheap shed alarm and some garden lighting will help deter.

NutterzUK · 13 Sep 2013 at 12:05

bitslice said:
+1

You didn't state so I'm assuming the lock was forced?
Proper through-bolted hasps and a shrouded lock would be £25-50.
If they can't break the lock they will rip the walls, door or roof off, suggest reinforcing the shed with plywood and/or additional struts, decent hinges.

A cheap shed alarm and some garden lighting will help deter.

Hi, thanks for the your replies.
From the shed they took a BBQ, a bike and two gas cylinders. They were all locked together, and the garden gate is locked however the door to the shed itself was not. We only moved in recently and hadn't yet fixed up the shed. You could probably just break in to the shed from the side if you wanted to, it's fairly old. We are looking at reinforcing it and have since added a lock. The house of course is alarmed, but the shed is not. It's too easy to get into our garden because of how easy it is to get in the neighbors. I will put in one of those shed alarms but I head mixed reviews about them.

I'll take a look in to setting up a system on the Pi to see if it's feasible for us. I do have one knocking around somewhere, since we moved house recently I need to find it first. Are there any particular cameras you would recommend?

Thanks,
Steve