If you’ve a house here in Spain or holiday apartment, you might have wondered before how great it would be if you could see what’s going on in your home when you’re not there?
Wi-Fi enabled home security cameras have moved on a fair bit over the past few years and are now very easy to setup and use yourself without any specialist knowledge. This month we look at one of the options for home security.
The company TP Link (there are many other brands out there of course but I can only report on the one that I have used personally) have a range of competitively priced, quality cameras called “Tapo”. You can see the range here – https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/cloud-camera/?filterby=5848
All their cameras connect to your home wireless by using Wi-Fi which makes configuration very easy. Of course, you need to think about placement carefully (especially those you might want outside) as the cameras still need to be connected to the mains. There are some other cameras that are battery powered (not TP Link) but I like the fact that if something is plugged in I don’t have to think about whether the batteries are full or not.
Most of their cameras “record” what they have seen using an SD card (purchased separately), the maximum size that is supported is 128Gb, which would give you around 2+ weeks of high-quality recorded footage before the older footage is overwritten. Each of the cameras can be setup to record on event (when something is “seen”) or set to permanently record and each camera has a whole range of settings that allow you to be notified when something is spotted – those notifications can also be customised by day or hour, for example, only notify you from 10pm to 8am.
The cameras work from an app on your smart phone and automatically are accessible from inside or outside your home (if you have mobile Internet of course). You can configure the screen to show multiple cameras at once and you can also zoom in and out of each camera to see more detail. The cameras even have built in microphones and speakers so you can listen to what is happening and talk through the camera if you want – I use mine sometimes to tell the dogs to be quiet if they are restless when I’m away from the house.
I find the settings comprehensive, there are even options to store footage to an online service if you want to store more information, but there is a fee of course for this.