Home Security Surveillance: How To Build A Powerful, Efficient Home Video Surveillance System

For peace of mind, there's really nothing that beats a body guard. You know, someone trained in self-defense and paid to jump in front of a bullet for you. Trust me - you'll have a long search ahead of you if you try to find a high-ranking celeb or politician without one. Many even have teams of people providing home security surveillance , monitoring the entry points to their estates, watching over them while they sleep.

Unfortunately, people are expensive commodities. On the other hand, technology, once you own it, will work tirelessly for whatever purpose for which it's intended. While a well-integrated home video surveillance system won't be able to protect you, a combination of alarm sirens and recorded footage will go a long way to both scaring off intruders and ensuring that you can identify them and bring them to justice.

Of course, in order to record high-quality footage for days or weeks at a time, you'd need an extremely powerful computer system capable of storing terabyte upon terabyte of information. Many people do just this, purchasing expensive Hybrid Digital Video Recorders (HDVRs) that record multiple camera feeds at once. Other people subscribe to online storage clusters, to which data is wireless transmitted as it's recorded, ensuring that there's no possibility of intruders tampering with recorded home security surveillance footage. Both these solutions use a system of looped recording that copies over footage a few days or a week after it's recorded, ensuring your data pool doesn't become unreasonably large.

There is, however, a much more nifty solution to the problem of storing digital footage. It involves the judicious use of PIR motion detectors which, with a little uncomplicated rewiring, can be used to activate your home security surveillance system. PIR motion detectors cover a cone-shaped area, and are activated by a change of sufficient degree in the heat of that area. Thus, they utilize very little power and take up no storage space in terms of information. When activated, they'll cause your cameras to come into operation, setting them to run for a certain specified period beyond the last detected movement or change in the observed area.

All you need to do for an efficient home video surveillance system is to have your PIR motion detector rigged to activate the recording function of your cameras, and BAM - your information storage costs just dropped to negligible levels. Your system will now record only when it has to, for a fixed period. It's possible to make such a system even more effective, if you're willing to shell out some cash for panning, tilting and zooming (PTZ) cameras. These are capable of tracking motion, shifting to follow the actions of intruders. If that's too expensive, you can get motion-activated dummy PTZ cameras, which could do a lot to scare off thieves before they even enter the premises.

Home security surveillance systems can be constructed with the cheapest of materials or utilizing the most sophisticated technology (indeed, PIR motion detectors can be had for as little as $20). The best move when deciding which route you'd like to go is to do lots of research, determining how the ever-fluctuating market looks relative to your pocket, and determining whether you'll be able to do the installation as a DIY project. If it all looks too overwhelming and complex to you, you'd probably be best served by signing up with a good security company that will do the home video surveillance system installation and monitoring for you - and back it up with force when the need arises.