Two cameras, not one: the doorbell for the face, and one wired camera for the walk and the car. One wide doorbell, or a camera up on the second-story soffit, gets you a clip of a hood at 30 feet. That proves it happened. It doesn't say who did it.
Ask yourself one thing about any camera you're looking at: could you tell who it is from this clip? A wide camera only names someone who's close to it. Everything farther out is a shape in a jacket.
Camera one: a doorbell at face height
The doorbell's job is the face, from a few feet away, at about head height. That's the one view nothing else on the house gets. But a doorbell covers the front door and not much past it, and a few things trip people up:
- The box on the mat. Some doorbells can't see the box on the mat — Ring's wide-frame battery models often miss packages on the floor. A square or portrait frame, or a second downward-facing camera like the one on the UniFi G4 Doorbell Pro, keeps the package in the shot.
- The walk up. Cheaper Ring battery models record nothing before the motion trigger, so the clip can miss the approach. Of Ring's battery doorbells, only the Pro saves a few seconds from before the trigger.
- The recording. Ring needs a subscription to save clips; without one it's live view only. If you don't want a monthly bill, buy a doorbell that records locally to a card or an NVR.
Old doorbell wires can't carry data, so a PoE doorbell needs a network cable run to the door. Cat5e is plenty — no need to pay for Cat6a there. If getting that cable to the door is a fight in your house, put a Wi-Fi doorbell on the existing transformer and spend the cable budget on the driveway camera instead.
One note on the microphone: Washington requires everyone's consent to record private conversations, so most homeowners turn camera microphones off.
Camera two: a wired camera on the walk and street
This is the camera that gets the walk in, the direction they came from, and the car. Mount it 8–10 feet up. Higher records tops of heads, and second-story soffit height gives almost nothing you can identify someone from. Lower is easy to grab.
Aim it so the spot where people actually walk is close to the camera — the closer the better. A wide camera mounted off to one side and angled back across the front sees the package area and the front of the house together. If the thing you need is farther out, like the end of the driveway, a zoom camera aimed at just that spot can trade width for detail there.
Then think about night. In December the sun sets in Seattle around 4:20, so a late-afternoon delivery sits on the porch in the dark and the night image is the one that matters. Keep the camera out past the eave and away from walls and shrubs: anything solid close to the lens bounces the infrared back, and the background goes black. Angle it down and away, and keep the glass clean — dirty or wet glass scatters the infrared too.
Where a camera can go is usually decided by the cable. Install day is mostly cable: outdoor-rated Cat5e or Cat6 to each camera spot. Running a spare cable to each camera location is cheap insurance.
If your NVR has PoE ports built in, you don't need a separate PoE switch — the NVR powers the cameras. The systems we install record to a recorder in your house, no monthly bill, with live view and playback in a phone app.
Getting your footage to Seattle police
SPD says package thefts often rise between October and January, and some thieves simply take what's left in plain view of the street. Cameras alone don't stop theft; getting the package out of view of the street does more — a locker, a pickup point, or a scheduled delivery. What a camera gives you is something to hand over.
How you hand it over matters. If you just watched it happen, call 911 or the non-emergency line (206-625-5011). The online form is for cases with no suspect and nothing to follow up, and SPD says most of those won't be investigated.
On a walkthrough we walk the property, count the door, driveway and side-yard approaches, and show you what each camera will see. Questions worth asking: Where will someone's face be when they bend for the box? Where does the car stop? Can the cable reach the spot that gets both?
Have questions about your project? Contact us for a free estimate.
