All the ones I've seen seem to be sized for installation on a light box. You want to use as shallow a box as you can get away with so you don't decrease the wall insulation. If you use the really shallow ones, you might be able to surface mount them on the sheathing over the tyvek.
Do you even need a box? If the camera is PoE, you're running low voltage and tiny currents.
I think your best bet is to look up some of the cameras, then go to the Mfgs website, and read the installation guide.
Don't put them all at 8 feet. That's really easy to hit with a spray can of paint. Mind you: Any camera is subject to a paint ball gun
You can often find dummy cameras. These can give a bit of false security while you are waiting to afford the others, and they can mark the places where your cable comes through the wall.
Place one camera where it can read the license plate, both coming and going.
Place at least one camera where it can get a good face shot of someone leaving the house. These cameras are much more difficult to scout, and most thieves aren't actively looking for surveillance on their way out.
Monthly Costs
You can evaluate the electricity cost for a security camera setup yourself. Take a look at the cameras that you are interested in and note how much power each camera consumes. This may be a direct rating of Watts or it could specify operating voltage and current. You can compute the Watts from the voltage times the current. So say that the cameras are rated at 12VDC and the current for each camera is 0.25A (equivalent to 250mA). So 12V x 0.25A = 3Watts per camera.
Next you have to consider a power supply unit that would provide the 12VDC for the cameras from mains power. These units are not 100% efficient and consume some power as well. Typical efficiency may be say 75%. So if you happened to deploy 10 cameras at 3W each that would be a total of 30W load on this power supply. The 75% efficiency would mean that the supply will require 30W / 0.75 = 40W from the mains power line.
Electricity is typically sold in units of KWatt-Hours (i.e. 1000W usage for 1 hour). Electricity cost will vary a lot from region to region so for sake of discussion lets make an estimate of 0.25USD per each KWatt-Hour used. (This will be high for some many regions in the USA but for sake of discussion let us guess high).
Let us base cost of operating cameras on a 30day month. At 24 hours per day that totals out to 24 x 30 = 720 hours per month. The 40W that we computed for the AC line power is same as 0.040KWatt. The total cost of operating cameras day and night for the month will be 0.04 x 720 x 0.25 = 7.20USD per month.
You can follow this process to come to a more realistic calculation based upon your actual electricity cost, the number of cameras you deploy, number of hours of operation per day and the actual Watts of power used by each camera. The numbers I chose above are just seat of the pants values chosen to illustrate the calculation. Your actual monthly cost may be quite a bit lower or could be higher if you chose to use many many power hungry cameras.
Installation
There are many schemes used to install security cameras. Whether any particular scheme requires you to make holes in your house will depend entirely of things that only you can determine such as:
- Type of cameras that you choose to purchase
- Method of powering the cameras (battery, DC power wiring or Powered through signalling cable)
- How signals get from camera to monitoring system (Ethernet, WiFi, coax video)
- Your concerns for camera and wiring hiding versus visibility
- Your capabilities and tool resources to try to do a DIY install
Best Answer
Night vision, the type most sold to the public, relies on some low level lighting to enhance and produce objects. Infra red light does this or any light with a red output (or any red colored lens in front of a standard bulb). The heat lamp spot bulb will allow you to view objects in a larger area(or field of view) and see them brighter, but unless your camera or scope has a lens that can focus you will not be able to see any further than what the lens is set at.