Most houses need more cameras than the four-camera kit in the box. IPCamTalk's install guide puts a modest house at 6–8 cameras for decent outdoor coverage, and owner-reported counts on real houses run higher than that. The number comes from how many approaches the property has and how far each camera can actually identify a face, which is why security camera installation starts with a walk of the property rather than a floor plan.
How many security cameras you need, by home size
Rough starting points, before you walk the site:
- Townhouse or small lot, 2–3 approaches: 4–6 cameras.
- Typical single-family, four sides plus a garage: 8–10 cameras.
- Larger homes, corner lots, detached structures: 12–16 on a 16-channel NVR.
Count entry points, not square footage
Square footage is the wrong variable. A small house with an L-shaped footprint, a detached garage, and a gate onto an alley needs more cameras than a larger rectangle on an open corner lot. Cameras cover approaches — the paths a person physically has to take to reach a door, a window, a vehicle, or a package.
So start by walking the property and counting: front door, back or patio door, garage service door, driveway, each side yard, gate, and any ground-floor window group that isn't visible from another camera. That list is your channel count, and it's almost always larger than four.
Why the four-camera kit runs out
IPCamTalk's install guide lists "too few cameras installed" as one of the most common mistakes, and puts a modest house at 6–8 cameras for decent outdoor coverage with 16+ channels of capacity for larger homes. Owner-reported counts back that up: 12 cameras with two more planned to close a side-alley gap, 11 with two more planned, 17 total, 9 across turrets, a doorbell, and indoor units. One homeowner put it this way: six covers a basic house, but "additions and angles of house can require more."
The blind spots people skip
A townhouse owner had cameras on almost every spot outside but one corner. Over two years, that corner produced three separate incidents, including a stolen EV charger and cut storage padlocks. The installer's reason for skipping it: no nearby power outlet.
That's not a real constraint with PoE. A single Cat6 run carries both power and data across a 100-meter (328 ft) channel — a 90-meter permanent link plus 10 meters of patch cordage — so "there's no outlet there" should never be why a camera doesn't exist. If the walls are already open, add the camera runs on the same pass as the rest of the low-voltage wiring.
Coverage math before you buy
Focal length doesn't tell you the field of view
A Reolink RLC-810A (8MP, 3840×2160) with a 4.0mm lens covers 87° horizontal by 44° vertical. The RLC-510A (5MP, 2560×1920) on the same 4.0mm focal length covers only 80° by 42°. Same lens number, different sensor geometry, different coverage. Swap the 810A to a 2.8mm lens and it opens to 101° by 55°; an AXIS M2036-LE at 2.4mm reaches 130° by 81° at 2304×1728.
Do the math from the published field of view, never from the focal length alone.
Wide-angle vs. narrow: identification distance
This is the trade-off people discover after an incident. The EN-IEC 62676-4 "Identify" threshold is 76 pixels per foot, and the IPCamTalk wiki recommends 100 ppf as a working target for home installs. In practice a 2.8mm wide-angle camera only identifies a stranger within about 10 feet. A manufacturer's DORI table for one 4K turret lists Identify at 23 feet (7 m) with the 2.8mm lens and 30 feet (9 m) with the 4.0mm.
More megapixels don't rescue it. In an IPCamTalk focal-length thread, a 4MP camera at 3.6mm could not identify a jogger at 90 feet, while a 2MP varifocal optically zoomed to roughly 54mm produced a face police could use at the same distance.
Practical layout: wide cameras for context, plus at least one narrow or varifocal camera aimed at the pinch point everyone must cross — a gate, a walkway, the bottom of the driveway. A varifocal like the RLC-811A (f=2.7–13.5mm) sweeps from 105°/55° wide down to 31°/17° zoomed, so one unit can be dialed in on site. Mount everything under 8 feet so you get faces instead of hats.
Night vision, power budget, and storage limits
Night vision in Seattle's dark season
On the December 21 solstice, Seattle gets 8 hours 29 minutes of daylight — sunrise 7:52 a.m., sunset 4:22 p.m., with the year's earliest sunsets around December 10–11 at 4:19 p.m. — and December delivers just 52.9 hours of sunshine all month. SPD data across 2023–2025 shows December is the peak burglary month citywide (2,323 of 25,351 offenses, residential and commercial combined), running about 25% above the February low of 1,864. Which means a large share of the hours your cameras cover are dark ones.
Night performance decides the count. The RLC-810A's IR is rated to 30 meters (100 ft) from 18 × 850nm LEDs — that's illumination range, not identification range. And IR creates its own problems: two 4K turrets mounted flush to a soffit about 9 feet up washed out at night from IR bouncing off the fascia lip below. Fixes are a standoff bracket, flat black paint on the fascia, or a bullet housing whose lens sits 4–6 inches further out.
IR also attracts bugs, which attract spiders. One owner cleared webs with a Swiffer on a pole "at least once per night" through summer. The technical fix is to disable in-camera IR and mount an external illuminator away from the lens — but budget the power: a camera drawing 8.5W plus a 12W illuminator totals 20.5W, past 802.3af's 15.4W port maximum (12.95W guaranteed at the camera) and into 802.3at territory at 30.0W / 25.5W.
Storage and NVR ceilings
Plan roughly 1.25 TB per camera for 30 days, then check reality. The RLN8-410 has 8 PoE ports and expands to 12 channels, with one internal SATA bay plus eSATA for a 16TB ceiling. The RLN16-410 gives 16 PoE ports, expansion to 24 channels, 25W per port, and two SATA bays. At 10–12 cameras in 4K, that single drive bay is what fails first.
Wire for the count you'll end up with
Follow the N+1 cable rule: run a second Ethernet drop to every camera location. A spare covers a dead cable and a camera you add later without reopening anything. The cameras themselves aren't the barrier — a Costco Reolink bundle with a 16-channel NVR, eight 4K wired domes, and a 4TB drive ran $600 in November 2025, with the standalone 8MP RLC-840A around $90. Note the drive in that bundle is thin for eight 4K streams. Keep the camera traffic on its own segmented network so the recorder isn't sharing a broadcast domain with everything else in the house.
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