The first thing I’ll say here applies to any kind of security: get it before you need it.
The psychological toll from a break-in or burglary can be very hard to anticipate; I would invest a considerable amount of resources to prevent it from ever happening. I wouldn’t wish the feeling of not being safe on anyone.
(I think I still carry some trauma from a serious break-in from my early teenage years when my family had to leave our home vacant for the better part of a year while my mom was treated for cancer many hours away at the Stanford medical center—one tragedy doesn’t make you immune to other misfortunes.)
If people do break into your home or car, I think you’ll feel a lot better if you have video of it happening that you can submit to the sheriff or the police. Unless someone is assaulted or killed during the incident, it’s very unlikely that any real investigation will ever take place, but knowing what happened and who it was (or wasn’t) can help to mitigate many sleepless nights thinking about what you could’ve or should’ve done differently. (And if they recognize a face or a car/license plate and the losses cross the threshold for a felony, they may invest more in your case.)
So I think it’s worth it to have some kind of security system. Wirecutter argues that you should only consider systems that are monitored, and I tend to agree—hyper-vigilance is another thing to avoid—but again, just having footage to look at is better than it being a mystery and spending months or even years never knowing if you just misplaced something or if it was taken or moved by the people who were in your home :/
There are a lot of systems available and what works best for you may depend on your specific circumstance (e.g. maybe you’re an Apple person with cloud storage and Eufy is the best option for occasional free recording while you’re away from home, or maybe you want something more substantial that includes door sensors and 24/7 monitoring to go with it).
But one tricky and risky situation is one where you have a property that’s not set up with wifi and is often vacant, like a vacation cabin in the mountains or a rental that is sometimes vacant between tenants. For that, I have some particular suggestions to get something in place quickly and easily:
- Ideally there will be some kind of cell phone service. If not, and if there isn’t internet because it’s too remote, starlink may be your only option.
- If there is cell phone service, you’ll want to figure out which provider owns the tower. They will typically share their service with partners who may offer things other than typical cell service, e.g. Eiot club uses AT&T/T-Mobile and also Verizon towers to offer cellular data for security cameras, trail cams/wildlife cams.
- Reolink has a pretty sweet setup: you can mount a camera that can be remotely panned all over the place and is powered by a small solar panel, insert a microSIM card from something like Eiot club, and if that’s your only reolink device, you get free cloud storage and notifications (with the small hassle of renewing your free subscription each month).
- This is what I would use for at least part of my setup if I were trying to protect equipment at a remote job site or animals out at a barn or something without power or wifi. The other thing that’s cool about it is that if an attack involves cutting the electricity, this camera recording to the cloud won’t be affected because it doesn’t depend on power or a wifi router.
- For more traditional security, you’ll want a system that can use cell phone networks and ideally has a way to stay on if the power goes out.
- Meeting these two criteria is Ring Pro. Officially it uses cellular as a “backup” but if you don’t have internet, it will just use the backup 24/7. You will end up with overage charges if there’s a lot of activity (or if you use the connection for other purposes) but the per gb price is pretty reasonable for keeping your cameras recording possible trespassers. It is a full system with a keypad you can use for arming and disarming and door and window sensors and motion detectors as well as cameras and of course monitoring—if something is triggered, they’ll call you to ask if you tripped the system. If you didn’t or don’t answer the phone, they’ll call the local authorities and report a possible breakin. You can still report a false alarm using your app to deactivate the alarm or by calling Ring, but it’s pretty great peace of mind if you don’t want to constantly wake up during the night to check your phone for possible alerts 😬 The annual fee is steep compared to “free” but it includes the monthly “internet” used by the system as well as the monitoring so it feels pretty fair to me. Especially when compared to the price of maintaining internet for a place where I really don’t need it/don’t want it.
- For simply recording things, you don’t actually need wifi or the cloud, especially if you can prevent the camera from being stolen either through camouflage, like with a trail cam or game camera, or by being very difficult to reach, e.g. up high without an accessible ladder.
- Remember that security itself is also a deterrent— I have a mix of very visible cameras and signs warning that I have 24/7 surveillance, plus more discreet cameras for catching those bold enough to still make an attempt.
- Laws around trespassing differ from place to place, but in many jurisdictions, the police or sherrif can’t take any action against someone snooping around your property unless you have clear signage marked “no trespassing” or similar. The exception is if they have actually entered your home.
- It’s lame and unwelcoming, but you may be able to find signs that aren’t quite as cartoonish as the standard ones to put at the entrance to your driveway or garden gate.
Notes on camera placement:
- Try not to set it in a place where spiders will build webs in front of the lens. Sometimes it will just be because there’s a railing that is convenient, or even an inviting opening in a small structure you build to try to protect the camera, but it can also be that the spiders are there intentionally to trap bugs drawn to the lights on the front of the camera.
- Try to avoid places where rainwater will splash the lens—this can happen if the lens doesn’t tilt down far enough, but also if the camera is too close to other surfaces. The problem is not really the water itself, but what happens to the build up of ambient dust on the lens when water hits it and then dries. It probably won’t affect your daytime views, but it can really degrade your nighttime viewing.
- Speaking of nearby surfaces: if the camera is in a climate with snow, make sure the snow won’t build up on anything in front of the camera. You can lose night-vision even if the lens itself isn’t blocked because the bright snow causes every other part of the view to be pitch black.
- Similarly, if you have a camera inside but pointed out through a window, you will have to disable the camera’s night vision so that its light doesn’t reflect on the window and block all visibility. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it at night though, you’ll just need a light source outside the window to light the environment (either with regular motion triggered flood lights or with infrared light that isn’t visible to the human eye).
One unexpected benefit of this whole thing is that in remote areas, security cameras are basically just wildlife cameras, so instead of trespassers, my phone is constantly alerting me to birds and deer and bats and bears and foxes and squirrels and skunks and lizards and the occasional mountain lion or ringtail (which has been a delight). And each time I go to check, I’m transported into the woods with the wind and the bird calls and the changing seasons.
So in some ways it’s a drag to need a security system, but in some ways I’m grateful that I was forced into it. Just another thing that makes the cost feel quite reasonable.