need basic cctv in external building.

[skybudda]

hello, i am having a gym built in my garden which is 100 feet from my house. my wife wants to work out down there when the kids go down for a nap or early morning/late evening. She will only leave the kids in a locked house if they are sleeping and if i install CCTV for her so she can work out safe in the knowledge that the kids are ok.
i'm not looking for a recoding system, merely a wired solution with sound that i can rig up to a TV/monitor in the gym. money is not my main driver here. i just need a couple of cameras in the kids rooms, and a monitor down the gym.
i live in East London and there are several firms that i'm sure can do this for me but i wanted to see if the forum could suggest a particular model or make sure i don't make any rudimentary buying mistakes?
many thanks in advance.
theo.

[iStorm]

1st point to think about is stay away from the cheap wireless systems available on ebay, To be honest a hundred foot run isnt to difficult to deal with, i'd say mostly it does come down to what you want to spend....
You could simply go for two black & white camera's hooked upto a switcher and a normal tv, you dont get any simpler than that, shouldnt cost more than a few hundred pounds to install, maybe worth thinking of having one by the front door if your wife is going to be 100ft down the garden and the kids in the house, locked or not!!

[Jim]

I agree Iain, a wired system is definitely better than a cheap wireless as I found out after buying a two camera system. They do work okay (and maybe in skybudda's case they might) but 100 feet mat be too far for most of them to function properly. These cameras are real buggy though with any static interference.

You might want to try setting up something with motion detection and an alarm built in since you say money is not that much of an option. The reason I say this is that, like in the instance of human guards, inactivity breeds inattention. So if you work out for a couple hours every night and nothing happens for weeks you begin to get complacent and think nothing ever will. Then your wife will only glance at the monitor a couple of times an hour if even that much. As the McCanns can attest, even a few minutes is enough time to lose a child. Computers don't get complacent. They can handle the boring task of looking for days at a screen that never changes and notify you instantly if something does.

Maybe set up the monitor in the gym and run an output to a laptop that your wife can use to sound alarms on motion detection? Or get a monitor system that also sounds an alarm and has built in motion detection. They're a bit expensive but not prohibitively so.

Good luck and let us know what you've come up with.