I had a look around but it looks like discussions on home security here are a little out of date and lacking.
I started thinking about a doorbell/frontdoor camera recently, but I don’t want Nest or Google Home or Ring or whatever, but I noticed the huge advantage these cameras seem to have is that they are battery powered and claim 2+ years of life so you don’t need to run a cable.
I can’t really run a cable, sadly. I rent and the screen door has no clearance around it at all. While I think I can get a flat CAT6 through the door frame without drilling any holes which would be amazing for a PoE camera, I’d only be able to mount it on the door itself. Solar is also a problem, since the door is west facing and there is a big building blocking a good chunk of the sunlight that I could get to a panel.
Does anything in this space exist? A Ring-like camera that has protracted battery life and can be hooked into local NVR / Home Assistant? I don’t even really need 2 years. Even just a month would do if I can just plug in a USB charger every now and then.
Do you already have a doorbell installed? If so you can pop it off use the 24v AC to power most door bell cameras, and then just stick the old door bell back when you move out.
We have one… It’s an old place built in the 70s (maybe?). The doorbell doesn’t work and the landlord has told us he’ll fix it “next week” for the past 5 years, hahaha!
Not a bad place to look though - there are cameras that’ll slot into that? And does that include ones I can locally host instead of hook up to a cloud service?
I would pop it off, and see if the wires have voltage on them.
It should be 24vac, as most door bell systems are.
The most common point of failure is the transformer that converts 120vac to 24vac so if the wires are dead, locating the transformer and replacing that could be an “easy fix”
Something like this will run off door bell power, and use your WIFI for streaming video. I dont like using WIFI because it will crush a consumer router, but as long as you have a decent AP with multiple radios and MIMO it should be ok.
The other issue I think there could be here is since this is such an old place it may never have been an electrical doorbell in the first place, but I’ll sniff around.
