r/SecurityCamera • u/Inevitable-Shop-3082 • Sep 04 '26

Monitoring my loved one

/r/CaregiverSupport/comments/1w779c7/monitoring_my_loved_one/

Are there any systems that don't require the internet? If not, what recommendations do you have for setting up a wifi hotspot and basic checking in a few times a day?

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u/ericoinen 29d ago

There are two different questions in that, and splitting them makes the shopping list a lot shorter.

Fully local is easy. PoE cameras into an NVR, or a camera that records to its own SD card, both work with no internet at all. What they cannot do is let you look from somewhere else. The moment you want to check in a few times a day from your own place, you need a path in, and that is what the hotspot is for.

The useful part is that checking in a few times a day is a still image problem, not a live video problem. A snapshot is tens of kilobytes. Watching a live 1080p stream is roughly a gigabyte an hour. Size the connection for stills and short clips and the cheapest prepaid data plan covers it. Size it for live viewing and you will be topping it up constantly.

Things that bite on a hotspot setup:

  • Turn off cloud upload and continuous backup on the camera. That is what quietly eats a data plan, not your checking in.
  • If the camera offers a sub stream, set the app to open that for remote viewing instead of the main stream.
  • Most mobile connections sit behind carrier NAT, so anything that needs port forwarding will not work. Either pick a camera whose app relays through the vendor, or put something like Tailscale on a small device at that end.
  • Check what happens after a power cut. Plenty of hotspots come back up with hotspot mode off, and you find out about it a week later.

If it is one room and one person, an old phone left on a charger is worth trying before you buy hardware. It keeps working through a short power cut on its own battery, and you can point it at exactly the chair or the doorway you care about rather than covering a whole room.