How to watch your house while you’re away for under $100

Have you ever left home for an extended period of time and wished you could peek in your house while you are gone? Sure, you could ask a neighbor to check on your house periodically but nothing beats real-time these days.

Well, right now I'm on vacation with my family in Florida and have been keeping an eye on my dog back home through the use of technology that cost me less than $100.

Now before you think I abandonded my dog, I didn't. I have a neighbor taking very good care of him while we're gone. But like I said earlier, sometimes I just want to check in myself to see how he's doing.

The equipment

All I needed to pull this off was a webcam and an iPhone app. And truth be told, you don't really even need the iPhone app. Any web browser would do but the app just makes it that much more convenient.

Let's start with the camera. I went with the Foscam FI8918W Wireless/Wired Pan & Tilt IP Camera with 8 Meter Night Vision and 3.6mm Lens. That's a mouthful but let me explain the benefits. First, the camera is wireless. That means it does not need to be tethered to any computer. This is a big benefit if you want to locate the camera somewhere in the house that isn't near a computer (although it does need to be near an electrical outlet).

Second, the camera has a 67 degree viewing angle. This is nice because it means you can actually pan and tilt the camera remotely just in case what you're trying to watch isn't directly in front of the camera.

And finally, the camera uses IR-LED illumination which is a fancy way of saying the camera can see in the dark for up to 8 meters.

The Foscam FI8918W Wireless/Wired Pan & Tilt IP Camera sells for around $85 on Amazon.com

Setup

Admittedly, there is a little bit of setup required if you want to be able to view the camera from outside your house. And the setup isn't really for noobies. For most people, it will require setting up an internal static IP address for the camera as well as some sort of dynamic DNS account (I used DynDNS.com) to be able to access your home network from your vacation destination. And it's also a smart idea to assign a username and password to your camera so you are the only one who can view your home while you're gone.

You can also input your email account settings if you want to get notified each time the camera detects motion.

Yes, it's a bit of work but the payoff when you get it right is worth the effort. And remember, you can always contact Noobie to help you set everything up (nice plug, huh?).

Monitoring

Once you have everything set up, the next step is to actually monitor the camera. There are several ways to do this. The easiest is by using a web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome. But if you're like me, you don't want to always have to be at a computer to monitor the camera.

That's why I use the Foscam Surveillance Pro iPhone app. This app allows you to do pretty much everything you can do with the browser. You can view the camera, move the camera, take a still photo, turn on/off the IR-LEDs and even control the sensitivity of the motion sensors.

The Foscam Surveillance Pro iPhone app can be found for $4.99 in the iTunes App Store

Peace and comfort

So, what's the payoff for the work involved setting this up? Easy. You get to see pictures from back home like this when you're sitting by the pool in Florida: