Spy Camera Scenario: Preventing a teenage house party

Scenario

Me and my husband are going out of town for a couple of days next week, leaving our teenage son alone in the house. At first we didn’t think twice about trusting him alone in the house, but throughout this week we’ve seen posts on his facebook wall hinting at “carnage”, and (I quote) “a wreckd orgy of destruction”. We are now terrified that we will be leaving our beautiful home at the mercy of a drunken teenage house party. My husband is especially worried about his valuable collection of antique Toby Jugs getting damaged. As we simply don’t trust the little so-and-so anymore, is there a reliable way for us to keep an eye on the house whilst he is away? We will have our smartphones with us, but we won’t be able to leave a computer running in the home whilst we’re out.

Solution

Whilst it might seem more like something from a bad teen comedy movie, the ease of spreading invites on social media leads to the potential for house parties to quickly get out of hand, and attract far more attention than oringally intended. It’s all too easy to find some frightening recent examples-

• July 2011– 1600 unwanted visitors gatecrashed a teen’s 16th birthday party in Hamburg, Germany. The enseeing mess required the presence of 100 police officers to clear, and led to calls in the German parliament for party invites to be banned on Facebook
• September 2012– After mistakenly setting the invite to “public”, a dutch teenager was sent 30,000 attendance confirmations to her small suburban house party. Despite eventually cancelling the event, the plans had already grown momentum, and around 4000 revellers appeared on the date, and proceeded to have a rave on her lawn. 500 riot police were called in to remove them.
• December 2012– 800 Revellers cause £30,000 worth of damage after descending on a 14 year olds birthday party in suburban Essex
• October 2013– Riot police were called in to move on 600 people who had gatecrashed a party in £1m home in North London. Eyewitnesses described the harrowing scene-  “one gatecrasher even vomited outside his front gate before asking for a postcode so his mother could collect him”.

So what options do you have for monitoring your home whilst you are away on the trip? There are actually quite a few, but this application has some specific requirements. Returning to a trashed house is no use, so you’ll need a solution that you can check live whilst on the move. Not only that, but you’ll want it to be discreet, so you can’t have somethig that needs to be connected to a bulky external device in order to work.

Both of these important requirements point you directly to Wifi IP cameras- digital CCTV cameras designed specifically for allowing you to view live footage over a network. The advantage of using these devices over webcams (another popular tool) is that they do not need to be left connected to a computer in order to connect to the internet, which makes them a lot easier to leave discreetly running whilst the teenage son is alone in the house. You simply connect them to your router for an initial set up, and install the correct apps on your phone. Once this is configured you can unplug the camera and access it over wifi using your phone- all it needs to plug into is the power!

We have a range of models to choose from, including our 720 HD camera with remotely controlled pan & tilt movements that you can control from your mobile device. If you need something more covert, we also offer a similar model that is tucked inside a PIR sensor housing, like you would use on a light or alarm sensor. This gives you a way of watching live footage from your home in crisp quality, without having to leave a DVR or constantly on to allow recording.