Home CCTV Installation in Ipswich

What a home install looks like

A typical house ends up with four to six cameras. The usual positions are the driveway and street frontage, the front door, the side access where the bins live, and the back yard. Each camera runs on its own Cat6 cable back to a recorder inside the house, which records around the clock to a surveillance hard drive. You watch live, get alerts and play back footage through an app on your phone.

The four camera package starts at $1,690 installed. That includes four 4K turret cameras, a four channel 4K recorder with built-in PoE, a 2TB WD Purple drive, cabling through the roof space and app setup on every phone in the house. Equipment carries a three year warranty and the workmanship carries five.

Highset Queenslanders and timber cottages

A lot of older Ipswich housing, in suburbs like Woodend, Newtown, Coalfalls and North Ipswich, is timber and up on stumps. These are often easier to cable than people expect. The cable can run underneath the floor and come up inside a wall, or cross the roof space and drop through the eave lining. Nothing needs to run down the outside of the weatherboards.

What these houses do need is a camera underneath. The open area under a highset house is where the car, the mower and the tools tend to live, and it cannot be seen from the street or from inside. A wide angle camera on a bearer, aimed back toward the stairs and the open side, covers it.

Brick lowsets and newer estate homes

The brick and tile lowsets common around Raceview, Flinders View and Brassall usually have a workable roof space, so the cable goes through the roof and out through the eaves at each corner. Newer homes in Springfield Lakes, Augustine Heights and the Ripley Valley are different. Roof pitches are lower, the space at the eaves is tight, and the roof is often full of insulation and ducting. We plan the route before we climb up, and sometimes a camera position moves half a metre to land somewhere the cable can actually reach.

Getting the camera positions right

A camera that looks good on the app can still miss what matters. Before anything is drilled, we hold a camera up at each position and check the live picture on a phone. You see what it sees. We are looking for three things: a clear view of faces at the door, enough detail to read a number plate on the driveway, and no blind strip down the side of the house.

Night is checked separately. Street lights, white walls and the pool fence all change how a camera behaves after dark, so the night settings are tuned once it is dark enough to see the real picture.

The app and alerts

Every phone in the house gets the app before we go. Alert zones are drawn around the parts of the yard that matter, so a car going past on the street does not set off your phone but someone walking up the drive does. You are shown how to scroll back through a day, find an event and save a clip, which is what police and insurers will ask for.

Questions people ask

Can I add more cameras later?

Yes, as long as the recorder has spare channels. If you think you might want more, ask for an eight channel recorder at the start. Adding a camera later is then one cable run and a mount.

Will the cameras film my neighbour's yard?

We aim cameras at your own property and the approaches to it. Where a camera has to look across a boundary, most recorders let us black out part of the picture with a privacy mask.

Where does the recorder go?

Somewhere inside, out of sight and near the modem if possible. A linen cupboard, the garage, a study or under the stairs all work. It needs a power point and a network cable to your router.