Low(ish) cost simple home security cameras

silver17

I've looked online and my brain is overwhelmed with all the options, can any make any suggestions?

- No drilling through walls

- Ideally not a subscription based thing

- I don't have an Alexa or similar to connect to

I'm wondering maybe a discreet internal camera to point out a window or something?

I'd really appreciate any advice. Thank you so much!

Mnoee

I have a few littlelf smart cameras - two very basic ones, one of which is in my porch pointing through a glass front door, one can move about and follow moving things on a horizontal plane (for spying on cats!) and one is an outdoor one that runs from a solar panel. Ranged from £15-35, very cheap, all take an sd card (£10 ish) and though there's options for cloud storage, I don't use that subscription. They can connect to Alexa but I use their standalone app. 

They're fairly reliable - the one in the porch is set to alert if it sees a human at the front door, which it does pretty accurately but sometimes not very fast. Sometimes it confuses next doors dog as a human. Not perfect, fine for the price. If you just want to record, I've had no issues with that. I had to contact customer service through live chat once, my query was answered instantly. 

The basic ones are very light and can easily be positioned on a wall using double sided tape. All except the outdoor solar one could just be placed on a flat surface. 

There's another brand that's more popular that I'm sure someone will mention - these are my first and only experience with any brand of camera. They do fine for what I need. 

A few issues with any cameras - if security is your main worry, anyone who is in your house and shouldn't be can take your camera including the sd card, so you'll not have footage. Any camera pointing through a window can't use night vision - the glass reflects in a way that it just doesn't work very well, so anything recording outside from inside needs to be paired with outside motion lights or similar to get footage at night. 

kipsterno1

Eufy camera system has worked well for us. Not that cheap but there are regular discount offers.

FreeBear

How cheap do you want to go, and how much do you wish to invest (and I don't mean money) ?

Lil'Sis was asking a very similar question of me earlier - I suggested an ESP32 camera module. For less than £10, it could quite easily be set up to send images to your phone and store on an SD card. If you are new to the world of ESP32, the investment in time is quite large.

I only started to mess around with them seriously last year so that I could connect my boiler to the home integration system. Now hacking one that has a builtin LCD touch screen to act as a thermostat control (will also display weather forecasts, energy consumption, and turn a couple of lights on & off). Currently in discussion with the developer of the code to add SD card support.

So what is your budget in ££ and Hrs:Mins ?

redped

I've got some Tapo cameras set up, quality is good for approx. £20 each plus the cost of an SD card - when using their phone app, we can view live (and stored) footage anywhere.  I've added some of their remote plugs, allowing us to turn lights, heating, etc. on/off remotely.

Novice_investor101

I use 2 Tapo cameras to watch ny dog while I’m at work. They can take SD cards to record footage. Footage quality is good & they can just sit on a shelf or window ledge or be mounted on a wall. £21 each, so very good value. I don’t record anything on them, I just use the real time images in the app to see what my dog us up to. 

I am contemplating getting another to record my garden because I suspect next doors kid’s are coming in while I’m not there. 

silver17

@Mnoee @kipsterno1 @redped @Novice_investor101

Thanks for all the replies! Sorry for the tagging but I have a question for all. I will look into all of these though!

Just to make sure I am understanding properly (I know I sound thick) - if I pop an SD card in, can I set them to be constantly recording? How much space would 1 day take up in storage? I'm not wanting purely live feeds and getting an alert and then have to manually record, as my work means I don't always have my phone accessible to me. There have been some antics during the day and they happen randomly (typically when I'm out) so I'm just hoping to finally get confirmation it is who I think! It's not anything major but at least it means I can have a polite talk with them about it all. Due to the reason for me wanting it, I can easily wipe footage daily as I know when looking at the front or back garden if someone's been mucking about on my property so don't have to wade through everything



@Mnoee Spying on cats cracked me up! Has made me realise I would be able to spy on the squirrels! This makes getting cameras even better haha. Night time isn't really much of an issue. I know some people have sensor lights that my driveway triggers or just being on the street triggers so if there are any night time antics then there would likely be enough light anyway!

FreeBear

silver17 said: Just to make sure I am understanding properly (I know I sound thick) - if I pop an SD card in, can I set them to be constantly recording?

If you are constantly recording data on an SD card, it won't last very long.

Used to use one to capture data from my home automation system. They were only lasting three months or so before failing. Have since switched to using a proper HDD with a life expectancy of 5+ years.

Mnoee

I have 128gb cards, and continuously recording that's about 6 days. It automatically overwrites. Might be more or less depending on whether you're recording in HD etc, usually the listing of the camera will have info on the maximum size card it'll take and how much footage that'll store. 

My cameras can automatically record a clip/take a photo at movement, I'm sure that's a very common feature. I do constantly record on most cameras though, for some I have an 'alerts' tab that shows a photo that I can click and watch starting at that time. 

If you do continously record, I'd set alerts for human motion anyway, just to know the timestamps you want to look at - going through the footage isn't the easiest on my cameras, I can watch it back and skip to a time, but there's not an option to watch at say 30x speed unless I export the video and use different software. You can turn off notifications on your phone and still have them listed when you open the app if you want.

Edited to add: I've had the same card in two cameras for three years without many problems - had to reformat it when it's glitched maybe twice on each which is as simple as clicking a few buttons in the app. 

531063

As said above Tapo

silver17

Mnoee said:

I have 128gb cards, and continuously recording that's about 6 days. It automatically overwrites. Might be more or less depending on whether you're recording in HD etc, usually the listing of the camera will have info on the maximum size card it'll take and how much footage that'll store. 

My cameras can automatically record a clip/take a photo at movement, I'm sure that's a very common feature. I do constantly record on most cameras though, for some I have an 'alerts' tab that shows a photo that I can click and watch starting at that time. 

If you do continously record, I'd set alerts for human motion anyway, just to know the timestamps you want to look at - going through the footage isn't the easiest on my cameras, I can watch it back and skip to a time, but there's not an option to watch at say 30x speed unless I export the video and use different software. You can turn off notifications on your phone and still have them listed when you open the app if you want.

Edited to add: I've had the same card in two cameras for three years without many problems - had to reformat it when it's glitched maybe twice on each which is as simple as clicking a few buttons in the app. 

Thank you for taking the time to explain. Not all of us are tech savvy so I really do appreciate the simple, in depth and yet non judgemental reply, it really has helped!