In my experience pretty much all IP cameras phone home in some way at some point, so yeah, you are best off putting them on a separate VLAN and routing appropriately.

The only brand I’ve had a good experience with is Reolink. I don’t think the quality is appreciably different than a brand like Hikvision and the firmware and support is vastly superior.

Edit: Some good info on using Reolink cameras with Frigate. I use Blue Iris but would vastly prefer OSS.

This sounds excessive, that’s almost 1.1$/day, amounting to more than 2kWh/24hrs, ie ~80W/hr? You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build. I’m running a AMD APU (known for shitty idle consumption) with Raid 5 and still hover less than 40W/h.

This isn’t speculation on my part, I measured the consumption with a Kill-a-watt. It’s an 11 year old PC with 4 hard drives and multiple fans because it’s in a hot environment and hard drive usage is significant because it’s running security camera software in a virtual machine. Host OS is Linux MInt. It averages right around 110w. I’m fully aware that’s very high relative to something purpose built.

You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build

Right, and spend even more money.

Residential electricity isn’t cheap

This is a point many folks don’t take into account. My average per Kwh cost right now is $0.41 (yes, California, yay). So it costs me almost $400 per year just to have some older hardware running 24x7