Over the last couple of years, I’ve got involved with CCTV cameras. It started with my Bird Box Camera (which had some activity in the first year). But that interest quickly moved into home security and doorbell monitoring as I learned about camera networking.
When I began playing around with the security CCTV, I noticed that at night there sometimes appears to be a lot of activity judging from the motion alerts that are triggered.
Some of it is cats (it turns out we have three who prowl at night). Some of it is spiders and their webs (the webs catch the infrared light and waft in any air current. Occasionally – but still quite frequently – it is insects, particularly moths, which are attracted to the infrared lights. If a large moth approaches the camera, you sometimes see a bright white blob with appendages, and if you playback the recording you can see it fly in, move towards the lens, then fly away again. It’s this which attracts the spiders, and as a result of those, I constructed a long-reach pole with a duster on the end. During summer it is sometimes necessary to remove the webs two or three times a night. I even bought some spider repellent called Spider-EX to try and keep them away (and it seems to work).
The upshot is that I quickly realised that CCTV picks up quite a lot, and not always what you are most interested in.
I also realised that some triggers are none of the above, and that in spring, for example – when the trees are producing pollen – clouds of it will be picked up as they are blown towards the camera at night (during the day it is invisible). Initially, of course, I didn’t know that, even though I had guessed at it when I saw the triggers. And that was why, when I Googled it, even on the reputable camera websites, I was amazed to discover that the majority of people posting there were convinced it was either ghosts or UFOs (often both). And I am not making that up. Hence the title of this article.
I mention this because tonight it is foggy. Not especially thick fog, but a heavy damp mist, and enough to warrant Met Office warnings about it. And it looks like this on my CCTV (the video at the top, which is in HD reduced from the 4K my cameras operate at). It looks like heavy snowfall, yet it is dry outside apart from the dampness.
For anyone who is interested, my cameras are all hardwired. I started with Wi-fi cameras in my bird box, but the distance between the camera and my router meant I got a weak and unreliable signal. I then installed a Wi-fi access point, which worked much better. I was able to get a very strong Wi-fi signal at the far end of our fairly large garden, and the birdbox camera could easily pick it up. But then, the bird in my box broke the aerial off the camera while hunting for bugs inside above the camera! Not wanting to have to keep repairing the camera, that was when I went with hardwiring.
I have a single cable from my computer room/router which I have run to the garage and two PoE switches. PoE is ‘power over ethernet’, and it means you can power a camera and network it with a single Ethernet cable. One switch daisy chains to a third in the shed. Doing it this way means I just need to have one hole in the brick cavity wall of the house, and I can route all the cameras to the garage or shed depending on where they are located. It allows for shorter cable runs, and drilling holes through wood is much easier than through brick, especially if the cables have Ethernet connectors on them. Wiring up your own Ethernet connectors to bare cable is something I discovered you don’t want to have to do too often if it can be avoided, and it is only marginally less troublesome than drilling a 16mm hole through brick to fit an already terminated cable through.