Where to Place Security Cameras on Your Home (and Where Not To)

Almost every homeowner who has ever needed camera footage has had the same experience. Something happens, you pull up the recording, and the camera was pointed twelve feet to the left of it. Or the sun was behind the person. Or the image is a beautiful, sharp, high-resolution picture of the top of somebody's hood.

Camera quality gets all the attention in the marketing. Placement is what determines whether the footage is useful. Here is how we think about it when we walk a Western New York property.

Start at the doors, not the yard

The instinct is to cover the whole property. The better move is to cover the places a person has to pass through.

Most residential break-ins come through a door, and the rest come through a first-floor window. That means a small number of cameras aimed at choke points will outperform a ring of cameras staring at open lawn. Start here, in this order:

• Front door. This is the highest-value camera in the house. It covers packages, visitors, service people, and the single most common point of entry. A video doorbell handles this well because it sits at face height by design.

• Back or side door. The one that is out of view from the street is exactly the one that gets used. In Buffalo and Tonawanda, that is very often the side door off a narrow driveway.

• Driveway. One camera facing down the driveway catches vehicles, plates, and anyone approaching the side of the house. It is also the camera that resolves the majority of "did they actually come?" questions.

• Detached garage or shed. WNY has a lot of them, they hold a lot of value in tools and bikes, and they are frequently the least protected structure on the lot.

• Main interior hallway or stairway. One indoor camera at the hub of the house covers anyone who did make it inside, regardless of which door they used.

  
  

That is five placements, and for most homes the first three do the heavy lifting.

Mount at eight or nine feet, not at the peak of the roof

High mounting feels safer, and it is the most common mistake we correct. A camera at the roofline gives you a lovely view of the tops of heads and no usable face.

Eight to nine feet is the sweet spot. High enough that it is not casually reachable, low enough that a person walking toward it fills a useful part of the frame. Angle it down slightly, and aim so that the person is walking toward the lens rather than across it. You want approach, not profile.

One more thing about height: put the camera where the light already is. Under a soffit, near a porch light, or beneath an eave protects the lens from snow, ice, and driving rain, and it keeps the housing out of direct summer sun.

Watch what the sun does, all four seasons

A camera aimed east is blinded every morning. One aimed west is blinded every evening. In both cases you get a bright wash of light and a person-shaped silhouette.

Before anything gets mounted, stand where the camera will go and look at what it will see at the times you care about. Then remember that WNY sun in December sits much lower than the sun in July, and a placement that works fine in summer can be washed out at four in the afternoon in winter.

Snow deserves its own line. A camera that faces into prevailing wind will pack with snow and give you a white screen for the exact three days you wanted footage. Tuck it under cover.

Lighting matters more than megapixels

Cameras do not see in the dark. They see in infrared, or they see whatever light you give them. Infrared works, but it is monochrome and it has a range limit, and it reflects hard off falling snow and off nearby walls.

Adding light to the area is usually a bigger upgrade than adding resolution. A porch light on a schedule, a motion-activated fixture over the driveway, or exterior lighting you can trigger from your phone through home automation will do more for the picture than a jump from one camera spec to the next. It also deters people before anything gets recorded, which is the better outcome anyway.

Avoid pointing a camera through a window from inside. Glass reflects the camera's own infrared straight back into the lens and you get a glowing white rectangle. If you want to see the yard, the camera goes outside.

Where not to put a camera

Some placements cause more problems than they solve.

• Aimed at a neighbor's windows, yard, or door. Cover your property. A camera that mostly watches the house next door creates a neighbor problem you do not need, and New York takes recording people in private spaces seriously. Angle and crop so your view stops at your property line as much as the layout allows.

• Bedrooms, bathrooms, and changing areas. Not in your own home, not in a rental you own, not "just for the dog." New York's unlawful surveillance statute is a felony-level law and it exists for good reason. There is no version of this that is a good idea.

• Behind glass, screens, or storm doors. Reflection, glare, and haze. Mount outside.

• Somewhere reachable from the ground. A camera at five feet is a camera someone can turn, cover, or take.

• One camera trying to cover everything. Wide angles trade detail for coverage. Two well-aimed cameras beat one panoramic camera almost every time.

Worth a mention if your camera records audio: New York is a one-party consent state for recording conversations, but that is a nuanced area and the rules are different for a home, a rental, and a business. If you are recording sound anywhere the public can walk, it is worth a conversation before you turn it on. If you own rental property, our guide on security for WNY landlords covers the tenant-privacy side of this in more detail.

Cameras record. They do not respond.

This is the part that gets lost. A camera is a witness. It documents what happened and it makes people think twice about being on your porch. It does not call anyone.

Footage is most valuable when it is paired with a system that acts. A monitored alarm sends a signal to a UL-listed central station the moment a door opens, and an operator gets working on it whether you are asleep, at work, or at the lake. The camera then tells you and the police what you are dealing with. Our post on the pros and cons of security cameras goes deeper on where cameras help and where they do not, and professional monitoring covers the response side.

Have someone walk the property with you

Every house is different. A double on the West Side, a ranch in Cheektowaga, and a farmhouse outside Lockport all have different sight lines, different approach paths, and different problems with sun and snow. Fifteen minutes of walking the lot with someone who has done it a few thousand times will save you from mounting a camera twice.

Call us at 716-693-4597 or request your free quote. We will look at your video surveillance options with you, tell you honestly how many cameras you actually need, and put them where the footage will be worth having. Serving Western New York since 1989.