Diy Home Security Systems: Putting Your Home Under Surveillance With A Home Security Camera System

The term "DIY home security system" probably, for most people

, calls to mind the image of a young McCaulay Culkin, beating the heck of the marauding crooks in Home Alone I and II. Of course, Home Alone was an early 90's phenomenon, popular in a time when auto-detection, visual and information technology were, despite decades of concerted effort, in their infancy, and something only qualified systems engineers or genius geeks could really do with as they pleased.

But computers have traveled light years in the past couple of decades. Hardware glitches, though still not a thing of the past, are far rarer, and operating technologies such as media recording and storage and motion detection is now a fairly simple business, accessible to anyone with the time to skim through a short user manual or do a little browsing on the internet. You can, believe it or not, actually build pretty efficient DIY home security systems using simple webcams of the sort people use to chat online. With a little more cash in hand, you can even override issues of poor lighting by installing your own infrared security cameras.

If the prospect of constructing a DIY home security system appeals to you, the best place to start is with the lowest of tech. An estimated 60% of burglaries in North America occur due to a door or window being left open. Make sure that you and your family are in the habit of locking everything up, even if you're just nipping down to the 7-11 for a pack of cigarettes.

Your next move is to have those doors or windows set off the alarm if they are somehow opened when you're not there. Your tool in this regard? Alarm contacts. These magnetic pads, one of which is secured to the door or window and the other to its frame, create a circuit that gets tripped when broken. When the circuit gets tripped, it will emit a signal to the central alarm system hub to which the contacts are tuned. Contacts are cheap - you can buy them for under ten dollars at just about any hardware store - making them ideal for creating a good DIY home security system.

If the idea of having a full-blown home security camera system is part of your consumerist dream, one neat trick you might want to keep in mind is setting up your contacts so that they activate your security cameras, putting them into recording mode the instant that the switch gets tripped. Aside from the vanity, there's truly little reason to purchase a camera more sophisticated than simple webcams to ensure that you DIY home security system covers all the various parts of your home. These are commonly sold in computer and department stores for as little as $20 (though they get powerful enough to be priced in the thousands).

Going infrared, by contrast, can be a very costly business. While the cameras are down from their 1970s pricing (which had them at around fifty thousand adjusted US dollars) those available from FLIR, the pioneering infrared security camera company, still bottom out at the, some might say, prohibitive price of $2000. The benefits of infrared security cameras are, however, definitely not something to be sniffed at. They can record detailed, high quality footage even in complete darkness. This they do by the use of microbolometers, which read off the black body radiation of objects (which, relating to heat, is something humans and animals have a lot more of than, say, furniture or walls). Integrating infrared security cameras into your DIY home security system would also eliminate the need for smoke sensors and, by rendering your home security camera system immune from changes in atmospheric conditions, bring it firmly into the 21st century.

by: Jeffrey Parker.

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