Practically Classics Forum

a couple of my local villages have had houses broken into recently, a couple of lads looking for gold & cash. they dont steal anything else but they make one hell of a mess in the process. we have a dog & little french woman (wifey & shotguns) to scare them off but ive been thinking of getting a couple of security cameras to cover the place when we are not here & help identify them.... we dont have any gold or cash lying about but we were broken into 8 years ago & they stole a cheap vase & all our knives & forks value (bizzare!!) £20 but the damaged window etc came to £700+
its no point waiting for the police to do anything as they were cornered in a cave but the police wouldnt go in as they might be dangerous & let them go........
id like to cover the outside of the place, i have several barns to mount them in/on i have no experience of them so be gentle with me

Rich, this is going to involve computers and ideally, a Smartphone too so I'm saying nothing except for this:

Your cutlery and the vase were probably stolen by someone who looked a lot like this:

and he may have had several hungry-looking freeloaders with him.

Hi Rich,
I used to be a CCTV installer. You don't need a computer (well not one that operates like a home PC anyway) to have CCTV. What you need is a multi-channel DVR. They aren't overly expensive these days depending on the quality you want and how many cameras. My suggestion for outside cameras are "vandal domes" they cost around £50 each trade. avoid anything with plastic lenses as over time they go milky. The more lines the camera has the better the picture will look (assuming you buy a DVR with the same or greater number). If you buy cameras with variable lenses then you can zoom in on what you want to cover.
In the industry there are 2 types of image. ID and over-view. what you should try and do is have a camera zoomed in on a specific area tightly enough to get a good quality view of the intruders faces (or registration of their car) then the remaining cameras giving an overview of the outside of your house so you can see what they are doing.
Installing them is childs play. I would go for 12v DC cameras as they are cheapest and run CAT-5 cable as you can use it for the power supply and video so less wiring for you to fiddle with.
What you can do with the better DVRs is connect them to your network at home so you can view the cameras from your PC. All of them will have an analogue output so you will be able to connect them to the AV socket on your telly.
I installed one on the farm last summer as we were suffering from diesel thefts. I didn't use dome cameras, I used traditional ones as I wanted them to stand out and look like CCTV rather than a domestic house where you don't want large ugly camera housings around. (google dennard cctv housing). The total bill for 4 cameras and the DVR with all the cabling, etc was under a grand using good quality kit (24v ac as some of the cable runs are too long for 12v dc). You can do it for half that if you use cheaper components but you very much get what you pay for and I didn't want to have to replace anything for a good few years.

Leave a few live trip wires inside the window and doors and fry the little b&stards

I fitted out my work a couple of years ago but the setup i used got quite complex in the end.
If you look on the maplin website you can buy a complete kit for a few hundred quid and the DVR's can be viewed on smart phones and over the internet the cameras are not as good as the expensive ones but still a good solid setup.

And anything you can buy at Maplin can be had for about 3/4 of the price elsewhere, such as Farnell, Just Radio or CPC. They're convenient, they're helpful and they sell stuff that gets people out of trouble when they suddenly realise that they've no 630VW 33uF electrolytic caps left and the person who bought a radio "fully working with no 50HZ hum" on eBay is coming for it at the weekend, but its reformed smoothing block has suddenly lost its value. Naturally, that happened to someone else.

Ordinarily, and where CCTV and similar stuff is concerned, the trick is to examine the system in Maplin but buy it elsewhere. It occurs to me that you may have to in any case, Rich. Is there a Maplin in France?

For the record, the cameras with the maplins kit are the cheapest of the cheap junk you could find. If they are put anywhere with direct sunlight 12 months and they will be scrap. The DVR units are OK, nothing special but they work. As the video files are not encoded (or encrypted if you want to go the whole hog) they aren't admissible evidence in court as you can't prove the video hasn't been tampered with. If you want to do it yourself then I would look and see who your local CCTV trade place is and see what deal they will do you for cash.

Get a couple of these:



They don't have to be mean, it's just too much aggro to break into a house with a couple big dogs so unless they're really stupid, they'll move onto the next empty house.

thanks for the advice chaps, £800 for a system is out of my league at the moment... weve got a jack russel but ive seen systems like this one & a pir light which takes photos

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Securesight-V ... 27c7ceb437

http://www.leboncoin.fr/bricolage/398060801.htm?ca=18_s

what do you think?

How about keeping it simple and using a camera trap or two?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bushnell-Trophy ... grid_i_0_0
These are the things the BBC use to film wildlife, fixing them to trees and collecting them later. Choose one with an infrared setting and yer villains shoouldn't realise they're being filmed.