Placeholder post... install in-process.  Will update with pics

This project is taking me longer than I thought.  I've got about eight hours into it so far, and I'm not done yet.  

Ran out of cable too ... had to improvise.

Will have pics when done.

Let's start with a site survey, so we can all understand what we're doing and why.

This structure is a 2000sqft single-story ranch, roughly L-shaped (with a side-loading garage).  There is a pool in the back, and the entire backyard area is fenced with a 6-ft board-on-board fence (harder to climb).  There are two gates, one on the #2 side, and one on the #4 side.






We're going to take advantage of the natural choke-points around the property, and attempt to get reasonable exterior coverage with about five cameras.  No interior cameras, as the owner didn't want any (the house is a rental; the owner thought the idea of interior cameras would creep out his tenants... probably a reasonable concern).

Going clockwise, starting with the gate camera on the #4 side, the cameras are numbered 1-5.  

#1  Gate camera (North), to cover any entrance into the backyard through the north gate.
#2  Driveway/garage camera, to get a reasonable image of any vehicles pulling into the driveway, or approaching the garage
#3  Front-door camera.  This one should get us a decent face-shot
#4  Gate camera (South), to cover anybody accessing the backyard through the South gate
#5  Backyard/pool.  This one is to provide general area coverage to the backyard and pool area



Tools/equipment used:

Power pigtails:




Four dome cameras, and one bullet (spray-painted to make less conspicuous):





Power supply and pair of baluns:




Cable, glow-rods, and ladder:




Generic 8-channel DVR (on left), UPS, and plywood:

Preparation is the key to almost anything... you'll minimize problems this way, and hopefully find any show-stoppers before you're halfway into the thing.

Once we'd determined locations for the cameras, we had to find a place (hopefully centrally-located) to run all the cables.  Fortunately, there was a water-heater closet that wasn't being used for much else... and it had a handy shelf where we could put the DVR.







Unfortunately, there was initially no power in that closet.  The water-heater had a 220 line, but that wasn't exactly what I had in mind.  I elected to look around for someplace where I could tap in, and found something right on the other side of the closet's back wall:

This outlet (Note:  NEVER NEVER NEVER work on live circuits... hit the breaker-box FIRST).




I ended up tapping into that box, and running a cable up...




And straight through the wall into that closet, where I wired up the needed outlet.  Problem #1 solved.







Next came time to pull/run all the Siamese cable.  I took an initial look up in the attic, and realized how much it was going to suck.  This house has a low-sloping roof, so there wasn't a lot of room up there (standing up was out of the question).  It also uses engineered trusses, so there's no chance of flooring the attic... you have to scramble from truss to truss.  It's also ass-deep in fiberglass, and about 170 degrees in the daytime.

Naturally, since I do some of my best work at night, I elected to run the cable at night... probably saved myself a case of heat-stroke.

I started by putting a hole in the top-right corner of the closet with a small hole-saw and a drill, then ran a glow-rod up through the hole.  It's smart to do this, otherwise you'll have exactly ZERO chance of finding your hole under all that fiberglass... and you don't want to dig through that fiberglass... you just don't.


The glow-rod kept hitting something, and I had to angle it over pretty far to get it to pass.  I couldn't figure out why... until I got up there.  Damned air ducts...





I'll get back to that later...



I went outside, made a 3/4" hole with my hole-saw, and passed a glow-rod and some cable up through the hole.  





Finding the bright-red glow-rod up in the attic was easy enough:





And I find Problem #2... this attic is divided.  

This house looks like it was built in two sections, and the garage was added on as an addition.  There's a sloping plywood divider that prevented me from getting into the other part of the attic (where the wiring closet was located).  




Fortunately, there was enough room to pass the rod underneath that plywood.  Here's the view from the other side (after I'd climbed down, went through the house to find the OTHER attic access, moved my ladder, climbed back up, and worked my way down between the trusses )




While in the attic, I taped the cable-end to the top of the glow-rod sticking up from the closet.  I went back down, and pulled the rod (and attached cable) down through the hole to complete the cable run:






After the first run of cable (Cam1), I decided to use the top-left corner of the closet instead, easily avoiding the air duct that bedeviled me on the first cable run.





Here's what Cam-1's location looked like after the cable was run:




Here is what Cam-1 will be observing... the North gate (and it will also cover the back door to the garage)







For reference, here is the first overhead view again... we are working on Cam 1:

The process of passing glow-rods and cable to the central wiring closet was repeated several more times.

Cam 2:




Cam 2 will be covering this area:







Cam 3:






Cam 3 will be covering this approach to the front door:






Cam 4 (wired this one last... and ran out of cable... had to come back the next day).  This one gets a post of its own.








Cam 5:






Cam 5 will be covering this area:

OK... let's talk about Cam 4.

Camera four will be mounted on the South gable-end of this L-shaped home, and covers the South gate into the backyard.  This is also where all the utilities come into the home, so anybody attempting to access phone/cable/power will be seen by this camera:

Looks like this as you approach that gate:




Closer look:




There's a security light above it to help it out at night:




Here's the other side of that gate, looking towards the front of the home:







We started by drilling through the siding and into the attic space with the very same 3/4" hole-saw we'd used for the other cameras (this ended up being a mistake... I'll get to that in a sec).  The rod-and-cable passed easily:




The cable was pulled down into the wiring closet using the same glow-rod method as the previous cameras, and cut outside for termination.

NOTE:  this is an analog camera, and we're using Cat6... so there's a video balun involved:




We used one pair for video (the green), two pairs for power (blue pair for negative, brown pair for positive), and one pair for zoom control (this camera has a zoom feature that the DVR can control).




Hooked it up to my portable service monitor inside, and... it works!




Here it is connected to the DVR:






Here's where we ran into problems.  Once I had the dongle and everything all taped up as small as I could get it, it would not fit through the hole:




Fortunately, I had a keyhole saw.  These are great for drywall, but in a pinch, they can be used to open up a hole.  This thing saved the day:







The other cameras (the Pano domes) were put up in the usual way... here is Cam 1 as an example:

Mount the base:




Crimp the power pigtail and screw-on a BNC connector:




Screw on the mounting plate:




Feed cables up through the hole, fit camera into the base, and rotate 1/2" to lock it in place:

Gratuitous spider pic (these bastards are everywhere late at night):  

So let us turn our attention to the wiring closet.

I took the liberty of mounting a piece of plywood on the upper-left side of the closet, to aid us in mounting various pieces of hardware.

Note the UPS, and the 12VDC camera power supply:




Here it is with the DVR in place:




Which works... here's the view through Cam 2:







Unfortunately, there's not that much room in that closet.




Mounting the LCD monitor needed to be done a different way... so I turned to the back of the closet door... and had an idea:




Most modern LCD monitors and TVs have the capability to mounted to a wall or flat surface.  You can learn about it here.  Looking at the back of that Samsung monitor, you can see four equidistant holes, arranged in a square... these are for a VESA wall-mount.




Remove the base:




Acquire a VESA mounting kit:




Attach it (they're quite strong... I'm picking up this monitor by that VESA mount):




Attach the mounting plate to the door:




Here it is mounted:

Sure don't... but this stuff is not hard to do.

It helps if you're lean and nimble.  A 300lb'er would NOT have been able to do all the climbing/scrambling I did in that tiny attic.

Here are the final mountings, and their respective views:

Cam 1:









Cam 2:









Cam 3 (this one needed to be re-aimed):









Cam 4:











Cam 5:

Yes.  I know guys who swear by the compression fittings, but all of these locations are very shielded/dry, and I've had great luck with the  screw-on kind.

Also one less tool to carry in my tool belt.

BTW, here's the view from the network client:

it's not done yet

So we have the left side of the closet almost complete:





The rest of the networking gear is on the right side of the closet:





That little black box in the top/middle is the PSU for the Ubiquiti Unifi access point mounted elsewhere in the home:






Unfortunately, the closet seriously lacks ventilation... and with all that electronic gear, it's almost 100 degrees in there:





Fortunately, the other side of that back wall butts up against a bathroom... and everybody likes their bathroom to be warm... so the solution is obvious.





An 80mm hole saw is about the same size as a 3" dryer vent (and hidden on top of a cabinet).









Here is the duct in place:





An 80mm standard ATX computer case fan (runs off 12VDC... so the camera power supply will power it nicely):





And here it is running... nice and quiet:





A 12VDC power supply (like the one we installed) can run all sorts of things.  In fact, it's being used to power the alarm system (panel shown bottom-right):

The owner wanted an additional keypad for the alarm, so it only seemed logical to power it off that main 12VDC power supply, as we did with the main dialer panel.  Wall-warts suck:





Additional panel:





Wall-wart... supplies 12VDC:






We decided to put it in the garage, which is an exterior wall, and insulated... making fishing more difficult.









We ran the wire up the wall by using a long drill-bit.  I recommend using a full-power drill... the torque these require is often too much for even the 19.2V drill:





We had to feed the power wire underneath the attic divide, as before:





Attached to the glow rod sticking up from the wiring closet (with electrical tape):





The view from inside the wiring closet... this definitely calls for some wire loom to make it look neater:





Pull on the rod to retrieve the wire:





At the other end, we open up the panel, noting the 9V battery.  This tells you that this panel will run on a range of voltage, so even if there's a voltage drop over that wire run, it will probably still power this panel:





The barrel connector on the power pigtail looks to be the same size as the stock adapter:





And it fits... time to crimp it on with a couple of butt-splices:






Hook up the other end, and we have our moment of truth:

Most of the skylink alarm system came as a package deal... think it was purchased at Amazon (at least the box it was sitting in was an Amazon box).  The owner purchased a second key-fob, additional motion sensors and door switches (I think the additional sensors and fobs go for $20-30 each).

The install was pretty easy.  Owner has it set to call his cell phone, at which point he can check his new camera system

(sorry for initially editing your post instead of replying.  Don't know about the other mods, but I just can't get used to the button placement )

Here's an Axis 241Q video server inserted into the installation.  I split the camera streams off at "T" junctions, so they could be fed to the Axis, and to the Analog DVR:

View through the Axis:

Here are some final pictures of the wiring closet.  I loomed some of the cable bundles:





I took out the Ubiquiti power brick, and am powering the access point off the PoE switch in the lower-right corner.  There's a small, rectangular in-line adapter that turns regular PoE into "passive PoE" to power the Ubiquiti unit.  You can see it on the right edge of this picture, with the red cable coming out the top.





Here's that side with the closet door open:





And here's that left side again with the cables cleaned up a bit and loomed.  One more Axis server is going into this setup, right below the 12VDC power supply:





Yeah, nobody was ever going to see it, but neatness counts.

One thing about security cameras... they like light (this actually holds true for almost all cameras).  A good way to cut down on energy consumption (and your electric bill), and improve the performance of your cameras, is to add more light.  In particular, motion-sensor lights.

Everyone immediately thinks of those huge, ugly motion-detecting flood-lights.  

Fortunately, that's not the only option these days.

We'll start with camera-1, and look at the current setup.  There's an existing light there (with a nice, efficient CFL bulb), but it looks like a sack of dogsh*t.





I have no idea how old this thing is, but the elements have certainly had their way with it:





We're going to replace it with something much nicer:





Remove the old light:





Even though you've killed the breaker/switch (YOU DID DO THIS, RIGHT?), it pays to keep a voltage sniffer in your tool-belt.





Remove old adapter plate, add new one:





And here you have it... nice little unit:





Very low-key too (I like that...).  The sensor element blends right in to the unit's housing, and can be turned to adjust the motion-sensor's coverage area:





Same situation with camera-5:





Corroded all to hell:





Take it down and replace it... the wiring is dead-easy:





Even a hanging one in the front... same deal:





Once I get these all replaced, I'll get some fresh pictures to demonstrate the improvement

Okay.  Catching up on this thread now.

Remember the crappy looking pendant light on the front porch?  






Long gone...  replaced by:




The polycarbonate dome on that camera was also replaced with a clear one, to enhance night performance... and I circled the PIR element on that pendant light.  I like it... very discrete.




The owner had decided on one more camera, in the garage:






We used an existing hole by removing a ceiling-mounted hook for a hanging plant:






Ran Cat6 (this camera was attached with a balun, like the bullet camera outside) and a two-conductor wire for a planned IR illuminator:






Became a casualty... got a hole in my hard head.  Those roofing nails are sharp, and protrude well through the roof decking.  Be careful:





Here is the dome illuminator with attached pigtail:






Couple of butt splices:






And it goes something like this:






And here's what it looks like at night... pitch-black in the garage (vehicle blurred out at owner's request):







And this job is basically done!  Hope everybody learned something.