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Shop Shop Alarm Systems

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I dont really care who's in my shop, dont need to know what they look like....just want them gone before they get loaded up so I have an alarm system integrated into my air system that runs a locomotive horn inside the shop ...when someone trips that trip-rope tied to the air valve aint nobody stayin' in that building. No mater what time of day or night, if Im at home I will hear that horn very plainly ( my bedroom is not more than 100 ft from that horn when it goes off).

That's hilarious! Bet you don't have mice, or cats, or glass jars in there either!

I really should beef up my sound too. But I don't keep air in my tanks.
 
Ya, but unless I misunderstood, @Chicken lights didn't want something with an internet connection. I don't think he has one. I am fairly certain that he does not have WiFi. Might be good to read his first post again.

Chicken - with all this amazing advice you have been given, what are your thoughts?

With you being gone so much, I'm having a bit of a problem trying to understand your needs. What are you trying to achieve here?
When I’m in the shop I’m blind, unless I open the door I don’t know who or what is going on outside. I’ve had a couple sketchy people, mostly Kijiji buyers, poke their head in the shop, when what they were buying was clearly outside the door. That’s annoying to think I might need to start locking doors or barring them, even when I’m around

Plus, some pecker head walked off with one of my mudflap hangers over the weekend. Doesn’t sound like much but unless I can scrounge one at a wrecker it’ll be a couple hundred to replace. A good chain is around $75 to replace anymore, or more

Basically so I know what’s going on in the yard and to watch over the truck
 
I know you didn't want WiFi, but do you have internet?

If not, I'm back to thinking baby monitor, door bell monitor, or similar.
Other than my phone, no internet. I don’t know how much data a camera would use up? I can try calling around again, but a couple years ago I was told there were no options for internet service
 
Well, there is always satellite. But big $ for low gain.

And if your cell connects, there is also a cellular radio. Also $ but not as bad as satellite. Check on plans from whoever your phone is with.

No Explornet dish there?

I guess with the right data plan you could also use your phone as a WiFi hotspot and then connect any WiFi camera to that. It would only work when you are home though.

As a last resort, you could setup a home network with no connection to the internet. I have WiFi routers you can have. My mothers is fairly new and she doesn't use internet anymore. Might be setup to stream porn though....... I could set it up for you ahead of time so all you have to do is plug it in.

Need to find cameras that will work on a home network without internet though. My last look didn't find any. With a small file server, you could even store video data when you away.
 
Some cameras require internet set up unfortunately and access to wifi is the only way. So do your research.

@Susquatch :), speed here is susposed to be 1gig, but it rarely drops below 6-700, even with everyone (4 adults) in video conferences and streaming at the same time. I have better speeds than my inlaw how lives in MS country.

Try a gaming router to allow access, you can limit usage for the little ones and give yourself priority.
 
If you can see the sky then you could always go the Starlink route. My bil at the farm was tired of paying for 25 Gpbs through Xplorenet and getting 1.5 or less most days. Paid around 800 bucks for Starlink. 10 minute setup and now gets 250 Gbps all day long. Virtually unlimited data, 1 terabyte and then it is throttled. 140 bucks per month. More expensive than Xplorenet but at least he is getting what he pays for.
 
I have starlink as well and i'm happy too. Wish it wasn't 150 a month, but I can download a dvd in a minute or two instead of 2 days like with our local isp.
 
Both my daughters live rural and both have Starlink, they like it way more than old systems they had but I have to say the wife & I are on Explornet and really have no complaints, she works 10 or 11 hrs a day on it ( since her company sent her home during Covid and say they have no intensions of moving her back into the office). She works on it & we have all the TV streaming options my daughters can afford to share with us & we never pin-wheel waiting for a movie or program to load. I think were at around $90 month.
Starlink has been good for the girls tho, one runs an internet order business and the other was in a NY office before Covid, then her entire Office building was closed so she started working remote from rural , actually remote Alberta doing video meetings with the same folks all over the world that she did when in NY.
 
We were essentially forced by Sasktel to switch to Xplorenet when they shut down their line of sight service. Cell phone internet access wasn't a thing then and we are rural enough to not get any coverage from Regina. It was appallingly bad. The slowness was bad enough that we couldn't pay our Xplorenet bill online because their server would time out trying to make a connection. The worst was that it couldn't maintain a connection for any length of time. Constant interruptions. Paying for 10 mbps and getting less than 1 if anything at all. The dialup service that we used to have was super slow but rock solid. After Xplorenet came the Sasktel Fusion cell service. Also terrible. And expensive. And unreliable. We have a local provider now that is giving me 20 mbps and charging me for 20 mbps. Lose service maybe twice a year for an hour or two. Almost always get at least 18 mbps.
 
Late to the party as usual, but with a topic I'm familiar with.

Up until last year (2015 was last year, right?) I worked for Xplornet. Not in sales, or phone support. In the back end, operations/engineering side so this is the straight poop. Warning: wall of text.

The phrase you're looking for is oversubscription rate.

What happens, in simple terms, is that there is say capacity for 100 Mb/sec aggregate throughput to you. Let's ignore the upstream since that doesn't come into play very often as a bottleneck unless you're sending photos to the cloud. So you pay for a 20 Mb/sec service, you're throttled to that rate. If there is you and four other customers, you can ALWAYS get that 20Mb/sec rate, since 20 x 5 = 100. So the five of your could stream 20 Mb/sec all day every day without interfering with each other. That's a 1:1 subscription rate, and you do NOT want to pay what it would cost.

ISP's count on not everyone pulling data at the same time. So say they put 10 customers at 20Mb/sec service. If all 10 tried to pull their full speeds simultaneously, nobody would get it. Mathematically you would each get 10 Mb/sec on a 20 Mb/sec package. That's a 2:1 oversubscription rate. BUT! It is unlikely that all 10 would be online exactly the same time. You pull a web page up at 20 Mb/sec, and while you are reading it, your 9 other neighbors stagger their browsing, so at no point is the access point being asked to deliver more than the aggregate it's capable of and everyone is pretty well happy.

Enter one of the shadier business practices. Say for example, the technology vendor says "based on our experience, a maximum overscription rate is 10:1 for a reasonable experience." The ISP says "well we can cram it to 25:1, charge everyone for the max and coin it! Besides, we advertise speeds as UP TO so we aren't lying." So when you're home in the middle of the day, all your neighbors are out, everything works since their connections are mostly idle. Kids come home from school, fire up the Xboxes, now everyone is competing for the same limited resources and the quality goes to shit. Also, say for example you're on a lightly loaded access point that is directed towards you. Your 90 year old neighbors don't generally USE the internet so you have free reign. And that's why when it works, it works well. When it doesn't it's shit.
 
Shame to hear that thats still happening. One of the reasons I switched from Bell to Rogers is the speed and consistence in the GTA area.

Can't speak for other areas but check your options.
 
Your 90 year old neighbors don't generally USE the internet so you have free reign. And that's why when it works, it works well. When it doesn't it's shit.

That's the way it's always been. When you ask about it, they all lie.
 
Currently we are up grading our camera system on the house, old system is 1000k at best. 8M 4K cameras, one with 2 way sound for the front door, which means I don't have to get up and open the door to say not interested. All being IP cameras. By the the time you see the camera its too late we can see you and its been recorded.

Good thing is neighbours don't mind as it adds protection for them as well.
 
My farm house and buildings are a half mile from the highway surrounded by forest. There are no neighbours to see anything. In some ways, my place looks like the perfect place to swipe tools and valuable farm equipment. Or so it looks on first blush.

My first line of defense is signage. This location is monitored by xxxx security company.

Then I have a mixture of static hidden trail-cam, Arlo, & Toucan cameras. The Arlo and Toucans are long range WiFi based. The re-chargeable batteries last a month or so. All are night vision IR based. The Toucan and Arlo have built in sirens, microphones, and speakers. Not only that but both can recognize a human vs animals, and vehicles.

The trail cams are used merely for recordings at long range - ie evidence after the fact.

I don't use a doorbell camera nor do we use the surveillance cameras for that purpose. I do have wireless doorbells though and they ring in both the house and the barn.

All the cameras operate from my Android phone. So I can control them, get alerts, check in on them, and make decisions no matter where I am as long as I have cellular reception.

My phone is also connected to my house and barn alarm panels so I can control and operate them remotely too.

Although everything can always be improved, we are reasonably happy with our system.
 
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