You'll have a hard time finding a member of the political or celebrity elite who doesn't have his own team of specialists monitoring his gates and home video surveillance system at all hours (not to mention his bodyguard, who ensures that any trip past the perimeter of his private estate is as safe as humanly possible).
This, sadly, is the kind of comprehensive service that is out of most peoples reach - and, indeed, is really not necessary for the average person. People call for cash to cover every hour of their time dedicated to your service, whereas machines, once you own them, will do your bidding until they break down. What's more, a fully integrated home security surveillance system, utilizing security cameras and PIR motion detectors, will scare off the vast majority of intruders, while at the same time recording footage to ensure you identify the intruders and prevent them from staging a repeat attempt.
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.
However, by cleverly using a few of the basic, low-end technologies that are staples of home security surveillance today, one can quite easily devise a much more efficient system of home video surveillance. To start, simply install PIR motion detectors all over the place. PIR motion detectors use only a tiny amount of power, require no information storage space, and will be activated any time someone walks into their cone-shaped field of view. They're activated by changes in temperature such that, when just a part of the field they're 'observing' changes, and that change shifts its location within their visual field, PIR motion detectors read that shift as motion.
Your cameras will thus only record when necessary, meaning that maintaining them as an element of home security surveillance will be far more cost-effective. One might further enhance the efficacy of such a home video surveillance system by installing panning, tilting and zooming (PTZ) cameras. Such cameras make use of sophisticated software to track the motion of intruders as they move about the house.
These days, you can buy a PIR motion detector for under , and simple webcams and door and window contacts cost even less. Thus it's certainly possible to build an effective home security surveillance system using only the cheapest of materials, even as more sophisticated, state-of-the-art technology offers advantages that aren't easily replicated on shoestring budgets. Obviously, the choice of whether to build your own home video surveillance system or sign up with a security company like ADT and have skilled technicians do the work will come down, first of all, to how much cash you have to play with, and second, whether the prospect of building your own system appeals to you. Remember that an alarm can only do so much when it comes to scaring off criminals - having a security agency capable of backing that warning up with armed force is truly invaluable in any crisis situation.
