Multi-Camera System Installation in Katy, TX

What a multi-camera system actually consists of

Five components make up every multi-camera system we install, and they have to be sized as a set.

• Cameras. Wired IP cameras, each fed power and data over a single Cat6 cable using Power over Ethernet (PoE).
• The PoE switch. Built into the recorder or mounted beside it. It has a per-port power limit and a total power budget, and the total is the one that runs out.
• The network video recorder (NVR). It writes every stream to disk, runs detection, and serves video to your phone.
• Storage. Surveillance-rated hard drives, sized for how many days back you want to be able to look.
• Power protection. A battery backup for the recorder and switch, plus surge protection on any cable that leaves the building.

A lone doorbell camera fails by itself. A system fails at whatever its cameras share: an overloaded power budget, a full drive with overwrite switched off, or a surge that enters on one outdoor run and kills the switch feeding all the others. Most of the design work on a Katy job is giving those shared parts headroom.

Four kinds of Katy property, four different systems

The Katy area is not one housing market. What goes on a 2019 two-story north of I-10 looks very little like what goes on a mid-century house near the old downtown rail line, and both differ again from five acres with a metal shop out toward Brookshire.

Subdivision homes make up most Katy calls, and the recurring puzzle there is the side yard. With about ten feet between houses, a camera mounted on your side wall mostly records your neighbor’s brick. We usually put side coverage at the front corner looking back along the gate, so a person coming through walks toward the lens instead of past it.

How we decide the camera count: pixels on target

Camera count comes out of a coverage map, not a package size. The unit that matters is pixels per foot across the scene. The IEC 62676-4 standard sets identification — enough detail to pick out a stranger — at 250 pixels per meter, which is about 76 pixels per foot. Recognizing someone you already know takes roughly half that.

Apply that to an ordinary camera and the limits get concrete. A 4-megapixel sensor is about 2,560 pixels wide, so at 76 pixels per foot it covers a scene about 34 feet across. Behind a 2.8 mm lens, which sees a little over 100 degrees horizontally, the frame is already 34 feet wide only 13 or 14 feet from the camera. Beyond that, the camera still shows what happened, but it will not produce a face you could hand to a detective.

That is why one wide camera over the backyard never does the whole job, and why we build Katy systems in two layers:

• Identification cameras at choke points — the front door, each side gate, the garage entry, the back door. People pass within a few feet, so a modest lens gets a usable face.
• Overview cameras for context — the driveway toward the street, the backyard, the pool deck. These tell you where someone came from and where they went.

Coverage overlaps at the seams, so a person walking from the driveway to the side gate never leaves one frame before entering the next.

Channels, PoE budget, bandwidth and days of storage

Channels

An 8-channel recorder carrying eight cameras has nowhere to grow. We size for today’s positions plus the ones owners typically add within a year: a shed, a second driveway angle, the pool.

Power budget

Standard PoE (802.3af) supplies up to 15.4 watts per switch port; PoE+ (802.3at) supplies up to 30. A turret or dome draws a fraction of that in daylight and noticeably more after dusk, when its infrared LEDs switch on. Pan-tilt-zoom units and cameras with heaters need PoE+ or more. What usually runs out is the switch’s total budget, which is often far below its port count multiplied by the per-port maximum.

Incoming bandwidth

Every NVR has a maximum incoming bitrate. Ten 8-megapixel cameras at high bitrates can exceed what an entry-level sixteen-channel recorder accepts, so we compare the spec-sheet figure against the real streams.

Days of storage

Storage is arithmetic. A camera streaming at 4 megabits per second writes about 43 gigabytes a day. Ten of them write roughly 430 gigabytes a day — close to 13 terabytes for a month of continuous recording. H.265 compression often cuts the bitrate to around half of H.264 at similar quality, and motion-only recording saves more. In Katy, though, swaying crepe myrtles and headlights sweeping across garage doors create constant motion, so we usually run the identification cameras continuously and the overview cameras on events.

Drives should be surveillance-rated models built for writing around the clock, and overwrite must be on; otherwise the recorder quietly stops the day the disks fill.

Pre-wiring a new build in Katy’s growing sections

Parts of the Katy area are still under construction, and the cleanest moment to wire cameras is after framing and before insulation. At that stage a Cat6 run from each eave position to the structured wiring enclosure is quick; after move-in, the same run means crawling a finished, insulated attic.

1. Ask what the builder’s “security pre-wire” option covers. On many production homes it means alarm contacts on doors and windows, not camera drops. Request the drawing, or let us read it.
2. Ask whether outside trades may work before closing. Some builders allow it on a schedule; others don’t. If not, the attic route after closing still works — it takes longer.

Each pre-wire drop gets a label at both ends, a service loop in the attic, and a mounting location we can find again through the soffit. The recorder location — typically a closet near the enclosure or an upstairs media cabinet — is settled before the drywall goes up.

Katy attics, summer storms and reservoir country

Attic heat. A Katy attic in July can climb well past 130°F by early afternoon. We schedule attic work early in summer, support cable instead of draping it across ducts, and never place a recorder or PoE switch in the attic or a closed garage, where drives and power supplies age quickly.

Lightning. A camera on the house sits on a short run inside the building. A camera on a pole, fence or detached garage sits on a long outdoor run that can bring a surge straight back to the switch. Those runs get a surge protector where they enter the building, bonded to the electrical service ground, and the core equipment sits on a UPS.

Water. Penetrations through brick and fiber-cement are sealed, and cable enters each camera from below with a drip loop so rain runs off rather than following the jacket inside. On siding, the camera mounts on a junction box that keeps the connections dry.

Flooding. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 made clear how much of the east side of the Katy area sits near the Barker and Addicks reservoirs. If your ground floor has taken water before, the recorder goes upstairs.

What moves a Katy multi-camera quote

We don’t publish prices: the same camera count can be a morning’s work or a multi-day job depending on the building. What changes a Katy quote:

• How many positions, and how many need identification detail rather than overview
• Fixed or varifocal lenses, and resolution per position
• Recorder channels, drive capacity and the number of days retained
• Route difficulty: two-story eaves, vaulted rooms with no attic above, stone veneer, or exterior conduit where concealment isn’t possible
• Distance to outbuildings, and whether fiber or a wireless bridge is needed
• Reuse of existing cable or an existing structured wiring enclosure
• For businesses: after-hours work, plenum cable, lift access and multiple suites

Quotes are itemized, so you can see which line each choice lands on.

Mistakes that bring installers back

• Infrared bouncing off the eave. Mount a camera tight under a soffit with the lip in frame and the night image washes out white. We review every camera’s night picture before leaving, not just daytime.
• Cameras dropping offline at dusk. Nearly always a PoE budget problem, exposed when the IR illuminators come on.
• Clocks that disagree. Unless every camera syncs to one time source, the driveway clip and the side-gate clip are a minute apart and reconstructing an incident gets hard.
• A stuttering phone grid. Multi-view on a phone should pull each camera’s low-resolution sub-stream; on main streams, sixteen tiles choke over cellular data.
• Spider webs. Insects gather at the IR glow, and webs across the lens set off motion alerts all night.
• Default passwords and open router ports. Phones should reach the system through the camera brand’s app or a VPN, never through a forwarded port.

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