SuperMom Surveillance Installation
My neighbor, Jen, mentioned to a friend that she wanted to install a home surveillance system. The friend told her to watch my Home Surveillance Installation video from 2012 when I installed a Zmodo system in my house. Jen watched it and said it seemed too hard for her to tackle but she really wanted to try. So I offered to help as long as she did all the grunt work – like squatting around the attic. 😉
Being a Mom is hard enough – raising kids, balancing a full-time career, taking care of a home – when you have someone to help. I consider a SuperMom to be a woman who does it all on her own.
Jen wanted a home security system for the same reason I did – to feel safer in her home, to be able to watch it remotely when she's away, to have visible security cameras to deter would-be criminals, to provide evidence that aids law enforcement if a criminal chooses to ignore the warning signs.
Being a cost-conscious homeowner, Jen didn't want to pay $50/month or more for a traditional alarm system with central station monitoring. A surveillance system allowed her to do her own monitoring with a one-time investment that would pay for itself in less than a year!
Jen's system installation was more involved than mine. I was able to use my vinyl siding to route the camera wires to my DVR in my basement. Jen didn't have vinyl siding and she wanted to put her DVR in the living room. The obvious choice was to route Jen's wires through the attic. This would protect the wires much better than mine. In fact, many people criticized my installation because my wires run along the foundation and could be easily cut from the ground. This wouldn't be a problem for Jen's installation.
After some research and reading reviews, Jen decided to purchase an 8-channel Lorex system from Costco for $499 which she considered a good value for high-definition cameras and a DVR with a 2TB hard drive. She could also count on Costco for support and a good return policy if she wasn't happy.
DVR Capacity
We estimated that Jen's 2TB hard drive will hold approximately 9.5 days worth of continuous HD video from six cameras. After that, it will automatically overwrite the oldest video. To increase the capacity, she could upgrade her hard drive or lower the quality of the video being recorded. She could also change her settings to the DVR only saves video when motion is detected. Jen said she rarely goes away for more than 7 days so she didn't see any issue with the storage.
What is the mobile app used?
The app is called “FLIR Cloud”.