Tips for installing your own surveillance system
As the old saying goes, ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ and with the recent availability of affordable web-based surveillance systems, keeping an eye on your property is no longer a privilege reserved only for the rich and famous. Web-based surveillance has made it possible for many people to install a system themselves, giving them peace of mind when they are away from home, whether they are on holiday, business, or at work.
But what factors do you need to take into account when choosing and setting up a surveillance system around your property? Jayne van Rensburg, Director of myhome247 provides guidance and advice to ensure that your home is safe and sound, all year round.
With new technologies emerging, Networked (or IP) surveillance solutions are a cost effective alternative to conventional alarm systems. It is generally expensive to install and maintain a traditional “bells only” alarm system and does not allow the end user to actually see what is happening in their home. This not only leads to an increase in false alarms but if you are to add on remote monitoring or cameras inside your home, the price sky-rockets.
By contrast, network cameras can be purchased and installed at a fraction of the cost of a traditional CCTV system, and these offer the flexibility of real-time remote monitoring, via the web, literately putting your house in your hands. A perfect scenario of how this adds value and peace of mind is with what’s colloquially known as the ‘Nanny Cam’; which enables parents to remotely check in to see how things are at home.
The latest technology for your bathroom
Desperate to check your email while in the shower, or do you need to check your facebook account for ‘other’ reasons? For now you will have to make do with your iPhone or laptop for those important urges, but other technology is finding its way in to your throne room.
While plasma screens, wireless appliances and Blu Ray DVDs are nothing new for the living room, dining room and even kitchen, bathroom manufacturers are beginning to discover ways and means to implement this latest technology in the shape of both accessories and sanitaryware into this serene space.
Erol Donmez, managing director for VitrA UK, says: “Interactive furniture will be the next product to dominate the bathroom market. Entertainment units comprising televisions, devices in which to plug your ipod and even DVD players will soon be common-place in the more luxurious of bathrooms.”
VitrA has already begun to enter this market with the Espace fridge. A tall unit with integrated fridge, this freestanding piece of furniture is designed for individuals who prefer the finer things in life; be it cooling bottles of champagne to sip while bathing or for keeping cosmetics fresh, the fridge epitomises a new generation in bathroom culture.
Sanitaryware
VitrA boasts association with some of the world’s most acclaimed and innovative designers. The Istanbul collection, designed by Ross Lovegrove, incorporates a clever option available on the WC pan - a cluster of LED lights with a sensor which activates upon movement, designed with those late night trips to the bathroom in mind. The lights will guide you directly to the pan, preventing any fumbling for the light switch in the dark, while adding a novelty to the room in daylight hours.
High Q+ is another designer collaboration between VitrA recently and German designers NOA. An innovative new line, the range combines technology, functionality and modern design while preventing hand-faucet contact, therefore maximising hygiene benefits. Users are able to control the flow and heat of water simply by moving their hands closer to icons on the basin, where the sensors under the ceramic body activate the faucet.
VitrA has also reversed the trend of using LED’s in brassware, instead installing them underneath glass washbasins to indicate cold with blue and hot with red and a medium temperature using amber. The High Q+ basin also has an ambient light option enabling the washbasin to emit a mixture of colour when not in use, introducing an attractive lighting effect into the room.
Top 10 tips for successful home technology
Nowadays, people take home technology for granted, and expect to have it in their homes. If you require some elements of home technology, but are not totally au fait with it, then you may find these tips that Kensington Home Technology provided us with highly useful for your own project:
Identify your requirements
Home technology is a term used to describe electronic systems in the modern home, including home automation, multi-room hi-fi, audio visual (including home cinema), lighting control, communications, networking, security and HVAC (heating, ventilation & air conditioning).
The first step is to identify how far you want to go with your technology. All modern homes have lots of technology in them, from data networks to surround sound TVs, music, lighting control, alarm systems, CCTV and so on.
Home technology budgets rise very steeply when the aim is to integrate lots of the technologies at the touch of a button – this is known as home automation and the best known product for this is Crestron. Crestron will allow the user to access their movie server, control the home cinema, control the lighting, listen to music, watch the CCTV, control the heating/AC, answer the door, intercom another room, water the garden and virtually anything else all at the touch of a button on one wireless tablet….The Crestron Home! (www.crestron.co.uk)
A less expensive way of living in a high tech home is to have all of the above technologies, but no centralised way of controlling them. It is important to ascertain your requirements early on, not only what technology, i.e. music, lighting, etc. that you want in the rooms but also how you plan to control it. This will give your custom installer the information that he or she needs to prepare a sensible quote.
Invest in your property
Spend money on the infrastructure – such as plenty of good quality cabling - even if it means having to save on the hardware. This infrastructure will help provide you with a future ready home. It will therefore add value to your property and make living in it all the more enjoyable.
Flexibility
Give yourself as much flexibility as possible by installing lots of cables at the time of refurbishment. For example, run plenty of speaker wires, even if you do not plan to use them in the near future. Cables are relatively cheap to install and will give you the flexibility in the future of having music in rooms where there may not be an existing requirement.
Also, try to have all your cables run back to a central distribution point, whenever possible. This will ease management and allow greater flexibility for upgrades and changes of use in the future.
Planning
In order to know where to run the cables to, the furnished layout of each room needs to be established. This means that before the electrician starts the first fix electrics, all of the positions must be known for furniture and home technology.
Don’t forget that this includes security (alarm sensors, etc) and also remember that home technology has specific power requirements too, i.e. 12V in the bathroom for aqua TV, or 13A in the ceiling for the projector that you want (not forgetting 13A in the ceiling for the screen - if you want it to come down at the touch of a remote control!)
Prioritise
As you have already identified the technology or functionality you would like in each room of your home, it is then necessary to prioritise each item. This will help your custom installer work with you to create a solution that is within your budget.
Simplify
Keep it simple! The more complicated it gets, the more expensive it will become. If you want a fully automated home with the ability to control everything from one screen, you will need a big budget. A good compromise is to have full automation in the principal rooms only.
Wired vs wireless
Where possible use a hard-wired connection for your home technology needs: it is faster, more secure and more reliable than a wireless connection, plus there are no health risks. Use standard cables that will work with all manufacturers’ equipment and avoid systems that require specialist wires as they can be incompatible with other makes of equipment.
Purchasing hardware
When choosing hardware do plenty of research in quality magazines such as “What Hi-Fi”, which offer an unbiased opinion on products in the marketplace. Beware of buying hardware for the cheapest price on the internet as this can lead to problems ranging from fraud, to grey imports and discontinued stock.
The easiest solution is to get your custom installer to supply and install the hardware, which will be less work for you, plus you know that they will specify the correct brackets and leads, etc. It is always a good idea to compare your installer’s prices with high street retailers to ensure they are competitive. Beware that a lot of custom installers will charge you extra installation costs if you provide your own hardware – just like a restaurant charges corkage if you bring your own wine!
Management
Work with a quality custom installation company (often referred to as an AV Specialist) that will design, project manage, supply and install all aspects of your required technology solution within budget. By centralising the management of several specialist trades you will save time and money by avoiding costly mistakes, breakdowns in communication and duplication of infrastructure.
A good way to find a custom installer in your area is to look on the CEDIA website. CEDIA: Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association is the trade association for the industry; and membership to CEDIA is restricted to good companies with insurance, professional indemnity, training programmes, and a professional work ethic. (www.cedia.co.uk)
Good aesthetics
To protect the interior design of your home, ensure that all technical implementations recommended by your custom installer are sympathetic to the property’s furnishings. Beautiful, hand-crafted cabinets can be custom-built to ‘hide’ unsightly techy boxes and cables, for example, without impacting the technology’s performance. Also ensure that recommended installations are as future ready as practical, i.e. that a change of mind will not require costly replastering or refurbishment.
Full HD over-air. Only a power cable is needed.
We all want our porn Disney movies to be showing on our HD TV sets in all their HD glory, but we may have those movies stored on a central server or have to play them in a noisy player (I am looking at you Xbox360 and Playstation). We just spotted some new tech developed by Pulse-Link that allows a 100% high def image to be sent over the air directly to a TV set.
Their TV has no extra boxes or wires going to the back of the screen. All they have is one single power cable. Much better than the usual twist fest that is the back of many entertainment set-ups. Better yet, the demo at Pulse-Link’s Carlsbad headquarters is sending the crisp HD signal streaming across the room wirelessly using the company’s silicon chips. The DVD player sits about 25 feet away behind a wall, highlighting that the their technology doesn’t need a direct line-of-sight to work. (please can you wipe that little bit of spit off the side of your mouth? Thanks.).
Moving huge high-definition TV signals wirelessly turns out to be a tricky task. It took Pulse-Link eight years to develop chips capable of doing it. Now – with development finally completed – comes the hard part: getting the chips adopted in the marketplace. We guess this may happen quite quickly, much like the adoption of the “free view” technology in the UK is now common place in most TV sets.
“We’ve been working for over two years with this technology, looking at integrating this into digital displays on the business-to-business side first,” said John Araki, a vice president for for Westinghouse Digital. “We’re looking to validate this technology.”
Sweet tech, and likely at the right time, but we will only be really excited by this when it is coming built in to 40”+ OLED TV sets. If that is not going to happen soon then a simple beer dispenser in the arm of the sofa will do just fine for now.
A powerful suprise just arrived at the office
A special delivery just arrived, can any of you guess what these are?
All will be revealed in an upcoming review. (insert evil laugh here)
7 top tips for keeping your Blu-ray discs alive
Hands up who sometimes does not put their discs back in their cases? Or leaves them in sunlight? Now that Blu-ray has officially won the historical HD disc format wars of 2008, we decided to pester one of the top Media producers, Traxdata, to see what can be done to stop your Blu-ray discs from heading to the mug coaster graveyard. Jacob van der Hoeven kindly provided us with the following top tips for keeping your media in great shape.
Read the rest of this entry »
Smokin’ hot Sony HES-V1000 home media server
Sony appear to be finally catching on to the idea that although they make great tech, often their design sucks more than Paris Hilton and a Hoover combined. Thank goodness that to start addressing this issue we have the new HES-V1000 system which quite frankly looks as sexy as the Cadbury Bunny (and yes, you know what we are on about).
Lets take a look at the recipe that this new Sony home media server brings to the table. It starts your multi-course, multimedia experience with a 200-disc player/changer supporting Blu-ray Disc™, DVD and CD. Next, MP3 and JPEG format support paired with a 500GB hard drive deliver the ability to meet all your audio and photo storage needs. A side of x-Pict Story™ HD and x-ScrapBook™ let you create customized, personal scrapbook slide shows with your music and photos. BRAVIA® Theater Sync™ brings you one-button control of all BRAVIA compatible components. A helping of HDMI connectivity provides the most advanced hi-def connection for your multimedia system. Compatibility with DLNA devices gives you the ability to stream music wirelessly to any room in the house and, finally, the Xross Media Bar™ graphic user interface ties the whole audio and video experience together by simplifying navigation of the server. Bon appetit!
One of the better systems to come from Sony, and one of the best we have seen to date that includes a Blu-Ray player built in… couple it with a subscription to Netflix or LOVEFILM and you are looking at a great home setup. We will soon be reviewing a new Sony HD projector which will go quite well with this box of tricks so be sure to jump on our feed and keep and eye out for that.
The perfect home surveillance starter kit
24/7 home security, monitoring and control is no longer the preserve of the rich and famous, thanks to the launch of a simple to use, affordable and reliable surveillance Starter Kit from myhome247. Comprising an XG1000 System Controller, discreet Panasonic BL-C1 Network Camera and a Door/Window Contact, you can now easily view your protected premises remotely, either from their mobile phone, or an internet enabled PC or Laptop. Pretty freaking sweet, but it gets better.
To provide 24hour security, the Starter Kit’s wireless sensors can be set to raise audible alarms, or interact with other devices (such as turning on a light) while real-time alerts to security breaches can be received instantly via email. The myhome247 Starter Kit can be set up to send email alerts up to eight different addresses when abnormal activity is detected in response to whatever rules (or macros) you have set. In addition, text message alert bundles can be purchased separately to allow instant notification of unauthorised activity via text message. We rekon that with some simple changes to the email handling you could use twitter or similar message services to send out an all points alert!
The Starter Kit makes it easy to monitor the property too from wherever you are in the world. You can view exactly what’s happening from your mobile phone by viewing live video or can look at the time and date stamped archive of captured events including play back of recorded video clips. This allows you to instantly see what is happening in your home and alleviates false alarms. Critically, the captured images/video clips & data are saved remotely to a hosted secure server, which means that any unauthorised intruder cannot corrupt the device the images are stored on. Smart thinking.
To underpin this comprehensive functionality, the Starter Kit uses secure wireless technology in the gateway, allowing it to communicate with all the peripheral monitoring devices. The network cameras can be used with Ethernet over Power modules (which are seriously slick) to eliminate the need for network cabling within the home making the system extremely easy to install.
Jayne Van Rensburg, Director of Mysecurity247 Ltd. said: “Security systems that provide remote monitoring are traditionally expensive to buy and install and don’t allow the end user to actually see what is happening in their home. This new system is extremely easy to set up and is very affordable. Also the fact that it is a modular system allows the end user flexibility to add a variety of devices and have full control over the system to suit their needs. Importantly, it does not need a PC to be constantly switched on and can support PC, Mac and Linux browsers in operation. But really the main feature is the instant access right into your home directly from your mobile, keeping you protected and connected 24/7.”
Pricing and availability
The myhome247 starter kit comprises the XG1000 System Controller a Panasonic BL-C1 Network Camera and a Door/Window Contact Sensor. The starter kits costs £249.99 with a nominal £5.95 per month fee for a 5Mb storage capacity and a variety of text message alert bundles are available from just £3.75. You can point your eyes at www.myhome247.co.uk to get all the detailed info direct from the source.
Personally… a great bit of kit offering a lot for the cash. Yes, you could buy similar items separately for less, but you lose the easy of communication between the devices, the simple setup, and the support for the system as a whole. Do you currently have a set up of your own or does something like this bite at your interest sensors?