Case Study – Stonegate POA

– Phil Burks Vice President, Stonegate POA

Stonegate is a 15 year old, 170 acre community in Tyler, Texas. We pride ourselves on our secure neighborhood, beautiful homes, a lake, and walking trails.

Being a gated community, our members have remote control entry access to our motorized vehicle gates. Occasionally our gates will be damaged by incorrect use, such as tailgating, or folks incorrectly going in the out gate. Our property owners association agreed we would benefit from deploying a security camera system at our entrance, in part, to help us identify who was responsible for any damage, as well as to enhance our community safety.

Initially we had tried battery-powered still cameras that operated on motion. The success was marginal at best – they were just not accurate enough to reliably catch people coming in and out of the gates. The right answer was to get a motion-based video surveillance camera system, so we set aside a budget category for it.

A colleague recommended we look at Eagle Eye Networks. Given my own background in security and software, I knew exactly what features I wanted in the system.

– First, I wanted to have the video stored off-premise in the cloud, rather than on premise. Why store the video in the cloud? For security – we didn’t want the storage device at the gate that would be vulnerable; we wanted to avoid any system shut-down or stealing of evidence by any perpetrators.

– I also knew I wanted mobile viewing. As well, I needed to be able to easily let other selected community members view the video, while maintaining the system’s integrity and privacy. We assign user viewing permissions to all our board members, with maximum privileges for the Property Owner’s Association President, and myself. From my iPhone, if we have an incident, I can search and view the recorded history from anywhere in the world.

Eagle Eye’s Security Camera VMS met my criteria.

Eagle Eye can take a mix of camera types, both Wi-Fi and wired. They allowed me to select the camera that I wanted, not restricting me to their cameras, so I did a lot of research. I decided on a $1,500 5 MP Axis Q1604 outdoor camera with excellent overall specs. I wanted to try to catch moving license plates 24/7, and this camera was not as adept at this difficult task in low light situations. We added two, 50 watt LED landscape lights to the area, which greatly enhances the images we record.

We’ve already had one incident since installing the Eagle Eye system, where a truck damaged our gate. We were able to simply search using Eagle Eye’s motion detection feature around the time of the incident to identify the responsible party.

The search feature shows a thicker line for vehicle motion, rather than the subtle markings of leaves rustling. In one recording, we could see one of our residents leave, then a truck coming in the wrong way. In another, we got a perfect picture of the man that damaged the gate, his truck and trailer. We could see him walk back to the gate, scratch his head, shrug, and take off. We circulated the captured still frames to our residents for identification, and later that day heard directly from the driver, who is paying for the repairs.

Our next step will be to put in a second camera at the entry gate pointing the opposite direction to give us a doubling of the information about a vehicle, including a face. Additionally we will be adding two more cameras on our exit gate. One thing we’ve learned is that it is best if you can point the camera where the daytime shadow from a tree is not going to cause continuous motion detection.

We intentionally keep our camera conspicuous – it looks a bit like Fort Knox at the entrance – as we want our members to see that we are looking out for them. By having the Eagle Eye Security Camera System in place, we are offering our residential community a greater feeling of protection.

– Phil Burks
Vice President, Stonegate POA