How many cameras does a house actually need?

Four covers most semi-detached houses properly. Here is how to work out which four, and why the number matters less than where they point.

The honest answer for most houses is four. But the number is the least interesting part of the question, and getting the positions right matters more than buying a fifth camera.

Start with how someone would actually get in

Stand at the pavement and look at your house the way somebody who does not live there would. There are usually only two or three ways to approach it without being obvious: the drive, the side path or gate, and the back if there is a lane or a shared garden behind.

Those approaches are your camera positions. Everything else is scenery.

One camera should be doing identification, not coverage

This is the mistake we see most often. Every camera is set wide so it covers as much as possible, and the result is a system where you can see that a person was there and cannot say a single useful thing about who.

Pick the one place everybody has to pass, usually the approach to the front or back door, and put a camera there at about head height covering a narrow area. That is your identification camera. The wide ones give you context; that one gives you a face.

Height is a trade-off, not a rule

Mount a camera high and it is out of reach and sees a wide area, but it looks down at the top of a hood. Mount it at head height and you get a face, but it is reachable. In practice we do both: the wide cameras go high, the identification camera goes lower and somewhere it cannot easily be got at.

So, four

Front, wide, covering the drive and the frontage.
Front door approach, tight, at head height.
Side gate or path, whichever is the way round the back.
Rear, wide, covering the back door and garden.

A terrace with one way in and one way out is properly covered by two. A detached house with a long drive and outbuildings usually needs six or more, and at that point the cable runs matter as much as the cameras.

What we do on a survey

We walk the boundary with you, work out the approaches, and stand where a camera would go before we quote anything. It takes under an hour, it is free, and it is the difference between a system that answers a question and one that just records.

We are approved installers for the manufacturers whose kit we fit, and everything here comes from doing the job rather than reading about it.