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Place an Indoor Camera

It records the inside of your home. That is genuinely useful in a narrow set of situations — a hallway that every route through the house passes, a back room with a door onto the garden — and it is a household negotiation in most others. It has no effect on whether anybody gets in.

Layer
Document
Effort
No tools
Time
20 minutes
Renter safe
Yes
Reversible
Yes
DETERNot this jobDETECTNot this jobDELAYNot this jobDOCUMENTThis job adds this layer
Place an Indoor Camera adds one layer: Document. Keep a record that still exists when somebody asks for it.

Before you start

  • Read the cameras, privacy and the rules page, and talk to everybody who lives in the home before ordering, not after mounting.
  • Tell anybody who works in the home — a cleaner, a childminder, a carer — before their next visit.
  • Decide who has access to the account and the footage, and treat that list as seriously as the list of people with keys.
  • Check what the listing says about where recordings go, because indoor footage is the most sensitive thing this site talks about.

The job

  1. Pick the choke point, not the roomAlmost every home has one hallway or landing that any route through the house has to cross. One camera there does more than three in individual rooms, and it involves far less of the household’s private life.
  2. Keep it out of bedrooms and bathroomsThere is no version of this where a camera in a bedroom or a bathroom is a good idea, including a child’s bedroom and including a spare room a guest uses. If the problem you are solving seems to require one, the problem is not a camera problem.
  3. Aim away from where people sitPoint the lens along the route rather than across the sofa. It is the difference between a camera the household forgets about and one that quietly changes how people behave in their own living room.
  4. Set it on something rather than screwing it to somethingA shelf, a bookcase, the top of a cabinet. Indoor cameras rarely need mounting, and a camera that can be moved is a camera you can reposition once you see what it actually captures. In a rental this also keeps the whole thing reversible.
  5. Decide the privacy controls before you decide the alertsMost indoor cameras can turn off, on a schedule or when phones are home. Set that up on day one. A camera that is off when the household is in is much easier to live with than one that is always watching and merely not looked at.

Stop and call somebody if

  • Somebody who lives in the home objects. That is the end of the conversation about that room, not the start of a negotiation.
  • The only place it would be useful is a bedroom. Do not fit one.
  • You are considering it to watch a specific adult in the household. That is not what this site is for.

What goes wrong

  • Mounting first and mentioning it later.
  • Putting one in every room and looking at none of them.
  • Leaving the account on a reused password, so the most private footage in the house has the weakest lock on it.

Where this applies

  • The Back Door — Privacy: a back door is usually the only approach to the house where somebody can work unobserved for as long as they like.
  • A Rented Apartment Door — The key list: in a rented apartment you have no idea how many keys were cut before you arrived, and no lock upgrade you can make changes that.
  • The Front Door — The jamb, not the lock: on most homes the strike plate is held by screws that stop inside a thin board nailed to the framing behind it.

Hardware this job may need

Sources