Prepping

Done Stamp

The closet organizer is done. I secured 3 pieces of 3/4 inch plywood to the wall, spanning 6 studs. They are attached with 52 two and a half inch screws- one screw every 16 inches whenever the plywood crosses a stud.

This is a rail mounted closet organizer. There is a screw through the rail whenever it crosses a stud, and a 1/4×20 elevator screw in between those screws, so that no section of rail is unsupported for more than a foot. Then the system is hung on the rail. I’m fairly certain that will hold it. I painted the plywood to match the wall, and now it looks great. One project complete. Including waiting for parts, it took just over a week.

The camera system should be done tomorrow. That project took 4 days of solid work during the day.

For those asking what cameras I chose, there are two types.

For fixed cameras, I bought five Lorex E842CD cameras. They are 8mp cameras that I placed in the central room of the house, the pool, the rear lanai, over the driveway, and at the front door. I am moving away from smart doorbells because it would have to connect via WiFi, and I want a wired setup.

I also added a PTZ camera. I wanted one with a good optical zoom, so I can see things at distance with clarity. I chose the Amcrest IP8M-2899EW. Like the fixed cameras, it’s also 8mp. It has a full 25x optical and 16x digital zoom. Using this camera, I can read license plates at 200 yards and the expiration sticker on them at 100 yards. It has built in AI that performs facial recognition. Don’t ask me how that works, because I haven’t played with it yet.

All of the cameras are attached to a RAID comprised of three 10tb HDDs inside of a Synology RS1221+ running the Surveillance Station software. That RAID gives me at least 60 days’ recording capacity.

At this point, I will be making minor adjustments to settings and things like that. I also need to learn to use the software, so I will be playing with that some. All in all, I have a good system that allows me to control my data and I won’t have to pay subscription fees to anyone.

The firewall keeps the cameras from connecting to the Internet. The VLAN rules only permit the cameras to talk to the disk station. That protects me from cameras that can be hacked or used to spy on my data.

Installing it required a couple of network changes, but I will lay out my final network in a post coming soon.

By Divemedic, ago

Cameras

As any of you who are regular readers here know, whenever I undertake a major project, I always debate, design, and document the dog doo-doo out of it. (Sorry, I just liked the alliteration in that sentence) Remember the solar project?

I had a cheap camera system in my old house. One of those where you run cables to the cameras and they save to a hard drive in a dedicated DVR. When I moved to this house two and a half years ago, we transitioned to Ring cameras. I regret that decision for the following reasons:

  • The cameras send their video to the cloud
  • The cloud is just a word meaning “someone else’s computer”
  • This means you don’t own the data, and Amazon does all sorts of stuff with it.
  • The quality of the pictures is only slightly better than filming with a potato

Even though none of the cameras were inside the house (when we went on vacation, we temporarily put cameras in the house), I still don’t like other people having my data or pictures of my house. Since I installed an entire network worthy of a small office building. Why not use that to increase surveillance?

Infrastructure

For those reasons, I wanted to get a new camera system that overcame these deficiencies. I wanted this system to have:

  • 4k video
  • Enough storage for 30 days of video retention
  • Wired cameras, no wifi

What I decided on:

  • Ethernet cameras
  • recorded on the Synology RS1221+ that’s my network storage. That server holds 8 HDDs. I have it set up with a pair of RAIDs, one for my data, and one for recording camera video.
  • The camera RAID is composed of three 10 TB HDDs giving me about 18TB of storage space
  • That 18tb of space is enough for six 4k cameras recording 24/7 for about 60 days
  • Software is Surveillance Station, which allows 2 cameras before licenses need to be purchased for more

My plan is to have six cameras covering the property.

  1. general surveillance camera covering the front of the house
  2. another on the back porch
  3. one viewing the back of the house and the pool
  4. one that views the kitchen/living room
  5. a PTZ camera on the front of the house. This camera will have a 25 or greater optical zoom to allow distance viewing without losing too much resolution.
  6. Doorbell camera (this one will have to be WiFi)

Two of the cameras already had Ethernet wires running to them: the one on the back porch went in quickly with no issues. The one covering the front of the house did as well, but even though it was receiving POE power, no connection. I thought it was a faulty cable. It turns out the construction workers who installed the wire got the RJ45 jacks installed wrong. That was quickly taken care of. That gave me two cameras right away.

I went into the attic to run more ethernet cables and discovered that isn’t going to be possible. The header for the wall where the server is just isn’t accessible from up there. I do have an Ethernet cable run to both the front and back of the house that was put there when the house was built. I realized the best way to do this is to use those cables as a trunk that feeds a managed switch. These two switches will allow me to branch those trunk lines into an AP and a camera.

That’s exactly what I did.

This involved expanding my network. My network became a server cabinet that carries most of the Internet, but also required several edge switches to serve other clients. It looks like this: 

             Core Switch
                     │
    ┌────────────────┼────────────────┐
    │                │                │
    ▼                ▼                ▼

Entertainment Pool Switch Front Switch

From there, it is easy. Wire the cameras in, and instruct the local (edge) switch to place the camera in the surveillance VLAN, the AP in the management VLAN, etc.

The entire project of Internet and cameras has gotten larger and more expensive than I planned on. I’m going to sit here on just the two cameras until next month, then install the doorbell and pool cameras. The PTZ camera will be last, simply because it’s the most expensive of them. That means I am on sort of a hybrid system at the moment, with two of my own camera and several Ring cameras.

Work in progress.

EDITED TO ADD

In case you haven’t caught on, I try to do a major project each year to improve my position. The first summer we were in this house, we added solar and Powerwalls so we would have backup power. The second summer was the pool, screened in lanai, and hurricane hardening. This summer is a two-fer. One of the projects is the network/camera project, the other is one that makes me far less happy. More on that later.

By Divemedic, ago

BOL no more

In 2015, I began stocking a cabin in Maine as a BOL. I had cached weapons, a boat, and a buttload of supplies there. All we had to do was get there, and we had enough supplies to get by. That is no longer the case. The caretaker of the facility passed away last year, and his wife has remarried. The new husband is not nearly as reliable, and is also a liberal. I no longer consider that location to be viable as a BOL.

I am making plans to head up there to retrieve most of our supplies, and we have decided to sell the boat, rather than drive up there to haul it all the way back. It’s more economical to sell it there and perhaps purchase a replacement down here.

By Divemedic, ago

Flooded

This is a story of me afro-engineering a solution to some flooding that happened to my rear lanai. Now that there is a pool behind the house, what was our back porch has been closed off by an electric hurricane screen. There is some outdoor furniture and a TV in there, and it now serves as a sort of “Florida Room” and a place to store outdoor items when a hurricane comes. More on that in a different post.

We had a thunderstorm come through on Saturday, and it was a fairly strong one. We got just over 3 inches of rain in less than 45 minutes. That caused a bit of an issue. When we put the pool in, the contractor put a drain in place that lies at the end of the pool deck closest to the house. It looks like this.

That is just a slot in the concrete about 2 inches wide and 4 inches deep. It discharges on both sides of the slab. Right above where that discharges, the downspouts from the gutter discharge. I dug a trench at that point, and ran a 4 inch corrugated pipe that runs about 20 feet back from the house. At the end closest to the house, it looks like this (pictured is not mine, it’s from the Internet):

The discharge was one of these valves.

When the pipe fills with water, the weight of the water causes the valve to open. Well, as near as I can tell, the rain was coming down so hard that the drains were quickly overwhelmed, the area near the inlet to the drain pipes was soon underwater, and this caused a backup that flooded my rear lanai with about an inch of water. The rug out there was saturated, but luckily it’s an outdoor rug, so a couple of hours and a fan soon dried it out, no harm.

While it was raining, I went outside to see what the problem was. It had been so long since we had gotten any real rain, everything was clogged with dead oak leaves: the downspouts, the intake drains, all of it. So I cleared the leaves out, but that didn’t help a lot, and got me bitten on the hand by a rather large, angry spider that had been nesting in the leaves.

I spent Sunday digging up the ends of the drain pipe, and I replaced the intakes with this:

Since it is taller and not flat like the old ones, the hope is that this grate can handle more water AND is not likely to be clogged with leaves. Then I also replaced the discharge valves with these.

I am hoping that this will be large enough to allow more flow through the pipe. According to my math, a 4 inch corrugated pipe that is 20 feet long with a 1 inch drop every ten feet should be able to move about 75 gallons per minute. I have two of them (one on each side of the house) so I should be able to drain about 150 gpm.

Also according to my calculations, a rate of 3 inches of rain in 45 minutes is about 30 gallons per minute. This system should be able to keep up now, if I can keep it free of leaves. I guess we will find out next time we get a good rain, which in Florida is about once a week or so.

Keeping water out of the house is important, and no all prepping is sexy. Hope this helps someone else.

By Divemedic, ago

Firefighting Advice

Those of you who read here know that I retired from the Fire Department in 2011, after spending nearly 3 decades putting out fires and rescuing damsels. So when I read a story like this one, I can tell you exactly what happened:

The power was out for days. Appliances like stovetops are frequently left on when the power is out. Once power is restored, the stove top comes back on, but there are usually things piled on top of the burners, things like boxes of food, utensils, and other flammable objects. Now you have a fire. If no one is home to detect it, the first hint anyone has is when the fire burns a hole to the outside (called self-venting) and a passer-by notices the flames. By then, it’s too late to do anything but keep the fire from spreading to other, nearby houses.

Generally, once a fire leaves the room of origin, the house is a total loss. When a fire starts, if it isn’t extinguished within 10 minutes (most times even less than that) the house will be a total loss.

For that reason, when the power goes out, best practice is to turn off every circuit breaker in the house, save one that powers a lamp, so when it does come back on, you will know it when the light turns on, but the chances of a fire are minimized.

By Divemedic, ago