Early September is when our camera calendar starts filling up, and it is not a coincidence. People who spent the summer thinking about a camera system usually want it in before the ground freezes and before the first storm knocks the power out.
Cameras do work here in winter. Plenty of the systems we installed five years ago are still running through February with nobody touching them. But winter finds the shortcuts, so it is worth knowing which parts of a camera system are actually bothered by cold and which are fine.
Cold ratings are not all the same
Two cameras can both say "outdoor" on the box and be rated very differently. The UniFi G6 Bullet is rated to -20°C. The G6 Turret in the same family is rated to -30°C. Both are IP66, both run on PoE, and they cost about the same.
In Norfolk and Brant we get a handful of nights each winter that dip past -20, and the wind off the lake makes exposed mounting positions colder than whatever the weather station says. That difference in rating is the sort of thing we check before quoting, not after.
One thing that surprises people: the rating describes a camera that is running. A powered camera generates a little heat of its own and generally rides out a cold snap. A camera that lost power at -25 and sat there for two days is the one that struggles to come back. That is a good argument for putting the recorder and the switch on battery backup so the system never goes fully cold.
Battery cameras have a bad January
Lithium batteries lose a large chunk of their usable capacity in the cold, and they charge poorly below freezing. A battery camera that lasts three months in July can need a recharge every couple of weeks in January, which means a ladder, in the snow, repeatedly.
This is the main reason we install PoE cameras almost exclusively. One cable carries power and video, the camera never runs out of anything, and the whole system stays up as long as the rack has power. If you want the detail on how much power a switch can actually deliver, we wrote a guide to PoE budgets.
Snow does strange things to night video
Two problems, both common, both fixable at install time.
The first is infrared bounce. A camera's IR illuminator lights up falling snow the same way high beams light up fog, and every flake becomes a bright blob a few inches from the lens. Motion detection then fires all night. The fix is usually a change of angle plus mounting the camera so the IR is not shining straight into open air, and on some sites we switch to a camera with a spotlight instead of relying on IR alone. Our post on night vision goes through the different approaches.
The second is glare off fresh snow. A driveway under a white blanket reflects a surprising amount of light back at the sensor, and a camera that framed nicely in October can wash out in February. We aim for the camera to look across a scene rather than straight down a bright open surface, which is one of the points in our camera placement guide.
Then there is the simple stuff: snow piling on the top of a bullet housing, and ice sheeting off a roof edge onto whatever is mounted below it. Under an eave, back from the drip line, out of the path of falling ice.
Fogged lenses come down to the install
Fogged domes almost always trace back to the install. Warm humid air gets sealed inside the housing on a September afternoon, then the first cold night turns it into water on the inside of the glass.
Good practice is straightforward: seal the cable entry properly, leave the factory desiccant in place, close up the wall penetration, and put a drip loop in the cable so water runs away from the housing instead of into it. Turret and bullet styles tend to be more forgiving than domes in our climate, which is part of why we lean on them for exterior work.
Why we push people to do the cable now
Once the frost is in the ground, trenching to a shop, barn or detached garage gets slow and expensive, and by mid-winter it is often not happening at all. If a camera run needs to leave the house, September and October are the cheap months to do it.
That goes for outdoor-rated cable, conduit and surge protection at both ends of any run between buildings, which matters more than people expect during an ice storm. We went through the outbuilding side of this in our piece on Wi-Fi for barns and shops.
What this costs
Cameras like the G6 Bullet and G6 Turret start at $319 each from us. A Cat6 drop installed starts at $195, or from $245 for Cat6A, and technician labour is $135 an hour locally and $150 an hour on the Hamilton, Burlington and Oakville side. Visits 31 to 60 minutes from our Norfolk home zone start at $395, and 60 minutes or more at $595, with the day's work counting toward that minimum. Nothing is a mystery: every job is quoted in writing before we start.
Josh also writes up the hands-on configuration side, smart detections and recording settings and the rest, over on his own site.
If you have been meaning to get cameras up before the weather turns, now is the right few weeks for it. Have a look at our security camera installation page, check that we cover your area, and get in touch for a quote.
Sources
- UniFi G6 Bullet tech specs
- UniFi G6 Turret tech specs
- Ubiquiti Canada store, Camera G6 Bullet
- Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canadian Climate Normals
Cabling, networks, cameras, access control, smart homes, hosting and software for homes and small business across Southwestern Ontario. Twenty-plus years in the trade, and we still answer the phone.