HOW TO...

Build a home security system for under £20

By Nik Rawlinson

What you need: Security camera

Time required: 45 minutes

Home-security systems can be complicated and expensive. You can spend money on proximity and movement sensors; door and window contacts; and multiple cameras running from a central hub. But if you don’t want a full surveillance setup, you can still strengthen your security with a single camera and the right software. One camera won’t cover every entry point, but positioned well it can watch over key possessions and alert you to unexpected movement.

A camera like this can be cheaper than you think, and most models come with apps that are easy to use. However, these apps may lock you into the manufacturer’s online storage or insist on saving videos to an onboard SD card that you can only access through the app. That’s not ideal if you want full control over how you manage and review your footage.

To make the most of a single camera, you’ll need to go beyond the app and manage the footage yourself. We’ll explain how to do this with the TP-Link Tapo C110 camera (pictured above right), which has a full price of £24.99 but was only £15.99 when we last checked on Amazon (www.snipca.com/57230).

It has a decent three-megapixel resolution with a wide field of vision, automatic night vision and Wi-Fi connectivity. If that doesn’t quite fit the bill, there are plenty of similarly priced alternatives from other manufacturers.

Whichever camera you choose, pick one with a hard-wired power supply rather than a battery. Battery-only models can run for weeks or months if they only “wake up” on movement, but for total security you don’t want to risk the camera running out of power at the vital moment.

The other essential requirement is RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) support. This streaming standard, created in 1996, is still widely used to control streaming media servers. It lets you stream footage to any device on your home network and record it, without being tied to a specific online service. The trade-off is that turning on RTSP often disables other built-in features. For example, the Tapo C110 can upload to TP-Link’s online storage or record to a microSD card, but can’t do either while RTSP is active.