Today we finished the rough install of our security cameras and alarm system at Langi Billin. We’ve got a bit of neatening up to do yet and fine tuning some camera angles, but the system is running. The cameras we opted for were a mix of Reolink Argus Eco and Reolink Argus 2.
All the cameras are solar powered and both models come with an inbuilt long life battery and they are a lot less expensive than we’d imagined they’d be. They both also have capacity for up to a 64Gb micro SD card which is enough to store a lot of footage. They are motion activated and you can adjust how sensitive you want them to be before they come out of sleep mode and start recording.
Additionally they are wireless and require no physical connection to operate. You could just run them as standalone quite effectively, however we’ve taken advantage of the fact that Telstra has just installed a tower a little further down the valley from us and Langi Billin finally has mobile coverage. So we’ve used a Huawei 3/4G modem powered by a 300W solar panel and a 70Ah SLA battery. The Huawei happily runs on 12 volts from the battery.
Reolink have a very reasonably priced cloud system from about nine dollars a month for a basic package. There’s even a super basic free package that has all the same capabilities as the paid ones just fewer cameras and less storage. It allows you to save the last 30 days of camera activation and watch the feed from your cameras live. You can even talk through them!
It troubles us that we need security, but if you’ve read our earlier posts you’ll know we had a whole shed stolen! Not happening again! It would be very hard to get into our shed without being detected and filmed. Anyhow we reckon if you do need to have security this a pretty good way to go. We also have an independent alarm system in the shed with multiple sensors and remote monitoring with its own battery back up. We bought everything second hand we could, the cameras and the alarm system though are new.
Just to be clear we have no affiliation with Reolink nor is this is any way a sponsored post (something we’ll never do!) but we thought it was reasonably priced way to add security that people may find useful – hope you have!