Family’s moving to a new place soon. Much as I would love to, I’ve been told I can’t get away with running cable drops from the loft or drilling holes into the wall, so I am forced to work with what is available. I am wanting to set up cameras on the property, at least 2 or 3 for security / monitoring purposes.

Here’s a rough map of the place: https://i.imgur.com/lBxHkrI.png

The corner in the kitchen is where my router / WiFi hub & mini server is based, as that is where the master socket is located. We’ve just renovated the place as well, so we don’t want to be doing more work / damage than necessary. As you can see, I have no real route to directly run a PoE cable from the center of the house to the outside.

I do have something of a workaround to this. At present, we have 2 potential access points (where we can provision power) from inside > outside (there’s an unused drain pipe that opens outside I could use for the brick shed, and an unused old vent for the dryer room) that won’t require me to drill through the wall, but at present I have no way of getting LAN connectivity from the kitchen (where the router is) to the outside. I do have two possibilities for this:

• Via a wireless relay (or powerline, which I’m not a fan of tbh) solution, running a LAN cable to a PoE switch > from either the brick shed (not really a fan as its being used for an animal atm) or the dryer room (easier, and has at least 2 plugs) to some cameras outside
• Using WiFi cameras – assuming the big cons here are expense, maintenance & power sources

I’m looking for options here. I don’t really want to be dependent on cloud based solutions like Ring because I don’t want to pay a continuous subscription, I just want something that will allow me to record / view at least 24hrs worth of video locally (I’m not against cloud itself, just not a cloud only solution) within the parameters I have.

Eventually Openreach will be provisioning fibre to the premises (FTTP) which will probably mean they’ll have to either drill into the brick shed or the dryer room as that’s the only place people won’t care if there is more work done (I am hoping I can negotiate to allow them to run the cable through the dryer room > into the the kitchen corner, but for now this is what I have.

​