Electrical – Wire identification for a camera system install

electricalSecuritywiring

I am replacing some old cameras that came with the home to more modern ones.

I took apart 1 of the cameras to find this: enter image description here

Now I am guessing the yellow is video, and black and red are power (hot and neutral?)

I am not sure what the wire beside the yellow one is doing. I should add these were most likely installed by Brinks a long long time ago.

Here is another camera I want to replace:

enter image description here
enter image description here

Here the wire coming in has 5 wires? 1 video and 4 power? Hmm not sure what to make of that.

The cameras I bought are Lorex ones that use power and bnc cables:

enter image description here

I am guessing I have to cut that cable open and splice it in? Does anyone know if the supplied cable has three wires? two in the power part, and 1 in the BNC part?

The other end of the cable is a disaster. It must split somewhere and the video part goes into this:enter image description here

enter image description here

The power might go somewhere here:

enter image description here

But I'm not sure…

I also wanted to install a video doorbell where there used to be a working camera:

enter image description here
enter image description here
backside:
enter image description here

This camera has 3 lines into it: black red white. I am assuming two power and 1 video? Most likely DC power? From my understanding the nest and ring ones use AC power — so this will probably not work?

Sorry for the long post, need some help!
Thank you

Best Answer

"yellow" is probably the center conductor of the coaxial cable for video, the black one beside it is likely the shield/outer conductor and grounded. Hard to see for sure with a mess of black goop on there.

A BNC coax has two conductors - a center conductor and a circular shield conductor around the outside.

Red is likely + DC (12 or 24 volts most likely) black will be - DC and probably also ground in most (not all) systems.

If the current system is not running coax (which it obviously has in the "video part" picture) all the way to the cameras you might need to run new coax. If it does, but without connectors, you might need to crimp new connectors onto the coax.

Related Topic