I’m having a new home built. There will be 2 POE cables run. One above the back door and one to the doorbell. The doorbell will also have the standard 16 volt wiring also. Looking for advice from people that have used POE cameras and doorbells on good equipment. Thanks in advance.
I’d suggest running more cables than that. Pretty easy to put them in now vs later. One at each corner, maybe one in the middle (if you plant to do 180 view cameras, one in the garage, maybe a few for wireless access points for better WiFi coverage. I’d even run a conduit to my mailbox now if I could.
Run way more POE cables. You will have great difficulty doing it later
LaurenWalker said:
All my cameras are Reolink.
X2. Including my doorbell. I have a Reolink NVR for the recording and I power each one with my normal POE switch (so I can have more granular camera control)
Unifi cameras are second to none in my opinion for ease of setup and the system is totally local to your house so there are no problems if someone cuts your internet. The cameras are expensive but there are no subscription fees to pay once they are set up.
You also don’t really need the AI stuff so you can go with the standard flex cameras like UVC-G3-FLEX.
You’ll need a Unifi NVR (network video recorder) but if you are not interested in having a large home network setup you can go with the UCG-Max for that and put like 1TB in it. You can still access footage from your phone remotely and get motion notifications but the footage itself is stored on the device so the size of drive you put in determines how long you can record for.
Let me know if you’d like some more info /r/UNIFI may also be able to help.
The Unifi doorbells are 2nd to none and the POE ones are great as they can’t be jammed like a wifi model. Run more cables tho. Have a back door, doorbell cam there too? A garage, run a camera feed there too. 2 if you can’t see the roller door and a man door in the same camera. Corners of your house and the driveway/any approaches too.
I’ve been able to reduce camera count and increase coverage by switching to POE panoramic cameras that have 180 degree view instead of the more typical 110 degree. That cuts down on how many cables to run. They also make splitters so you can run two cameras on one cable, but the cameras would ideally be pretty close to each other (think: corner of the house, where you want two cams to cover 270 degrees).
Separately, you can get external IR illuminators to brighten up dark areas, so existing cameras can see more. I have deployed the Tendelux DI20 in a few spots, and now my existing cameras can see soooo much more. Again, cuts down on the number of cameras/POE cable runs.
Run conduit to more locations if you can and leave pull strings. Failing that run more cable to more locations.
POE doorbells are only going to be better with time. However so few people have a POE drop at their doorbell the market is smaller.
Right now Unifi G4 doorbell pro POE is probably the “best POE doorbell” that I’m aware of. If you want to get into their ecosystem just for their doorbell is a question only you can answer.
If you put camera cable runs for exterior doors, you should put runs for the sides of the garage doors. Multiple cable runs to each corner of the house. Couple of runs inside for wifi access points in the ceilings. Couple of runs where TVs go. Couple for smart home signage/display in common area you might want it. Office. Each bedroom. ….
Basically… you can’t have enough conduit / cable runs. Adding cable runs later sucks and is far more expensive (usually) than doing it before your rough inspections…