I have a poe managed ubiquity switch and use reolink Poe cameras and reolinks Poe doorbell. Home assistant has great support for reolink; It's also local. I have home assistant save the streams on motion detection to a network mounted drive in home assistant

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That's awesome, looks like PB Tech have a huge range of Reolink!

But with choice comes more questions 😆. PoE means you don't need separate power for the camera. But it looks like they sell solar powered wifi ones. Is there a benefit of using PoE instead of wifi+solar?

[–] kurikai 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Well worth running Poe if you can. Poe can also power some wifi access points(I use ubiquity sps I bought cheap on trademr), so you can hide them in your roof space.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

It just sounds like so much work 😆. How does the actual running of PoE work? Do I measure the distance at say 18m then buy a 20m cable to use, or am I buying a big roll, cutting it to size, and adding the plug on the end? (And if the latter, how do I do that?)

Do I have to be careful about which cable I get to make sure it supports PoE, or can I grab any cat5 or cat6?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The solar/battery models don't run 24/7 - you can trigger them remotely (so you can check the live feed whenever) or they can trigger with motion. Still perfectly useful for a bunch of use cases (e.g. just checking if you closed something, or installed somewhere that motion sensing is reliable like a low-traffic corridor) but not super useful for, say, a front door.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Oh that's super useful to know, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Just to second this - I've upgraded all but one camera to Reolink RLC-810A a few years back and they're rock solid. All offline (no internet, but connected to Home Assistant on a separate LAN), all powered by a cheap unmanaged PoE switch from PB Tech. (Edit: this one).

They're recording 24/7 to their local memory, but I almost entirely use them via Home Assistant's ability to pull a JPEG directly from the camera (because it takes a fraction of a second at 4k vs the unbearable pain of waiting >10s for video to buffer even at SD resolution).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Oh wow, it's a PoE switch where it's all PoE, instead of only half!