I am currently in the planning stages of my CCTV system, which I am doing at the same time as multiple renovations to my home. The nice thing about that is at this time, I have most of the walls opened up so running cabling is not too difficult. I am running Cat6 cabling for general data usage throughout the house right now so I figured I should choose placement for cameras and get POE cabling run now as well. Running them inside the house is not a problem, I just pick where I want a camera and run cabling to that spot. The trouble I am having is with running the cabling for the outside cameras.
It seems to me that the most secure way of installing the cameras would be to run the cabling through the outside walls of my home, through the siding directly to where the cameras will be placed. In this way, I could have all of the cabling completely concealed, either inside the walls or inside the cameras casing/mounting. This seems pretty straight forward to me. Run the cable, drill a hole, pull it through, silicone the hole. The difficulty comes in to play as I am not 100% certain on some changes that I will be doing outside the house. I will be building a garage, but placement and size are yet to be determined. I will be adding a deck, but again size is not set in stone yet. I will be tearing off a small entryway on the side and rebuilding it, as well as the front porch and converting it to an enclosed porch.
As the dimensions, and really the actual possible structures themselves, are still up in the air it puts the idea of pinpointing camera placement up in the air. So the ability to just drill a hole where I want it is kind of on hold. The other idea is to run lengths of cabling to the attic (2 story house) or basement, leaving a lot of extra on them to be rerouted later when the placement becomes finalized. But this then leaves me with a need to run the majority of the cabling actually outdoors, either under the vinyl siding, or possibly underground in several areas. I am not a big fan of this, mostly for security reasons but also due to weather. I live in an area of the country that gets massive amounts of snow, and has long, harsh, frigid winters.
Is there a different approach I should be looking at? I just really hate to miss this opportunity while I have such unrestricted access to the insides of the walls.
It seems to me that the most secure way of installing the cameras would be to run the cabling through the outside walls of my home, through the siding directly to where the cameras will be placed. In this way, I could have all of the cabling completely concealed, either inside the walls or inside the cameras casing/mounting. This seems pretty straight forward to me. Run the cable, drill a hole, pull it through, silicone the hole. The difficulty comes in to play as I am not 100% certain on some changes that I will be doing outside the house. I will be building a garage, but placement and size are yet to be determined. I will be adding a deck, but again size is not set in stone yet. I will be tearing off a small entryway on the side and rebuilding it, as well as the front porch and converting it to an enclosed porch.
As the dimensions, and really the actual possible structures themselves, are still up in the air it puts the idea of pinpointing camera placement up in the air. So the ability to just drill a hole where I want it is kind of on hold. The other idea is to run lengths of cabling to the attic (2 story house) or basement, leaving a lot of extra on them to be rerouted later when the placement becomes finalized. But this then leaves me with a need to run the majority of the cabling actually outdoors, either under the vinyl siding, or possibly underground in several areas. I am not a big fan of this, mostly for security reasons but also due to weather. I live in an area of the country that gets massive amounts of snow, and has long, harsh, frigid winters.
Is there a different approach I should be looking at? I just really hate to miss this opportunity while I have such unrestricted access to the insides of the walls.
