You are at work and three people you have never met are in your hallway with the front door propped open. This is fine, it is what you are paying for, and it is also the reason every camera you own is about to become useless to you. A camera that fires on motion during a renovation is correct all day long, and being correct all day long is the same as being switched off.
People fit cameras for a renovation the way they fit them for a holiday, and the two situations are opposites. On holiday the house is empty, so any motion at all is worth a notification. During a renovation the house is full on purpose. Two labourers carrying a bath down the hall trip the same sensor as an intruder would, forty times before lunch.
What happens next is predictable. Day one you read every notification. Day two you stop opening them. Day three you mute the app, and the mute covers the whole job, including the afternoon somebody wandered into the study. The sensor was working the entire time. The channel it was shouting down had already been closed.
The gap in one line. During a renovation, motion is the expected state, so a motion alert carries no information. The thing you actually want to hear about is a condition: someone in the room nobody is working in, the side gate open after everyone has gone, the dust sheet no longer over the piano.
The instinct is to point a camera at the work. Resist it. You will get hours of people working, you will not watch them, and if you did you would not know what you were looking at, because you are not a tiler. The parts of a renovation that go wrong are at the edges, and every one of them is visible in a still photograph.
| Where | What you are actually asking | How often |
|---|---|---|
| The room nobody is working in | Is the door open, is anyone in here | Every 10 minutes, working hours only |
| Hall or garage where materials are stacked | Is the stack still roughly the size it was this morning | Start of the day and end of the day |
| Back door, side gate, garden | Is it shut and is anything of yours now outside | One check half an hour after the crew normally leaves |
| Whatever you covered before the job | Is the cover still on it | Once a day |
| Front of the house on a no show day | Did anyone turn up at all today | Two checks, mid morning and mid afternoon |
The last row is the one people are surprised by. On a long job the common complaint is not theft, it is days where nobody arrived and nobody said so. Two photographs of your own driveway a day answer that question without a phone call that sounds like an accusation.
A check is a sentence describing what you want to hear about, in the words you would use to a neighbour who agreed to keep an eye on the place. You are describing the exception, not the scene.
These are separate checks with separate schedules, and they can run on the same phone. The specific version beats the general one every time: a check written as "tell me if anything looks wrong" produces a paragraph of guesswork about paint tins, while a check written about a door and a box count produces a sentence you can act on.
This part is not a technical detail, it decides how the next six weeks feel. A camera mentioned on the first morning, in the same breath as where the key lives and what the alarm code is, is unremarkable. A camera discovered by a worker on the second week, in a room nobody told him about, reads as an accusation and it will be remembered on every invoice and every snag list after that.
There is a legal side too, and it varies enough by country that a forum answer is worth nothing to you. Two things are near universal: rooms where someone might be changing or washing are off limits no matter whose house it is, and audio is treated far more strictly than pictures almost everywhere. A still photograph of your own hallway, taken on a schedule, sits at the harmless end of that. Check your local rules rather than trusting this paragraph.
Checks are paid one at a time, so the bill is the length of the renovation and then it stops. The starter pack is 2000 credits for 2.99 euro, the light model costs half a credit per check and the fast model one credit. New accounts get 50 free credits without a card.
| Schedule | Checks per working day | Credits per day (light) | Ten working days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every 10 minutes, 08:00 to 17:00 | 54 | 27 | about 40 cents |
| Every 5 minutes, 08:00 to 17:00 | 108 | 54 | about 80 cents |
| Every 30 minutes, 08:00 to 17:00 | 18 | 9 | about 14 cents |
| Start and end of day only | 2 | 1 | under 2 cents |
A renovation is the rare case where the fast schedule is defensible, because the room you are watching should be empty and a ten minute gap is a long time to be in it. Even then the whole job comes in under a euro, which is the part that surprises people who assumed this kind of watching came with a monthly plan.
Can I put cameras up while contractors work? In the work zone and the route to it, yes, and contractors expect it. Not in a room someone is changing in, and audio is a separate and stricter question in most countries.
Why do motion alerts stop working? Motion is the expected state during a renovation, so every alert is correct and none of them tell you anything. By day three the notifications are muted, including the one that mattered.
Do I have to tell the contractor? Tell them on the first morning. A camera found by accident in week two costs you more goodwill than any theft it might have prevented.
What should it watch? The room nobody is working in, the stack of materials, the back door at the end of the day, and your own driveway on the days you wonder whether anyone turned up.
Does it give me evidence footage? No. It describes photographs in words. Evidence is a recorder's job.
What does a two week job cost? Around 40 cents on a ten minute schedule across working hours, out of a 2.99 euro starter pack, with nothing to cancel afterwards.
The renovation checks are usually somebody's first, and two others tend to follow. The one that stops the notification fatigue for good is why motion alerts fire on rain and headlights, and the one people set up when the job ends is whether the door is actually locked. If the bill is what you are weighing, the cost per day arithmetic is worked through on its own page.
Before the first van arrives, stand a spare phone in the room nobody will be working in, write one sentence about the door and the things in it, and set it to check every ten minutes between eight and five. Most days it will say nothing. The job it has is to be the one thing in the house still capable of telling you something, on a day when everything else is beeping about a man carrying a bath down the hall.
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