Lorex Cameras
Wired Into
Long Island Homes

Long Island numbers that shape a Lorex install

• Detached houses dominate. 364,529 of Nassau’s 477,860 housing units and 463,095 of Suffolk’s 579,790 are detached one-family homes (Census ACS 2023, five-year estimates).
• Two building eras. Median year built: 1955 in Nassau, 1970 in Suffolk. Levittown alone added 17,447 houses between 1947 and 1951, many of them ranches on concrete slabs.
• Two very different counties. Nassau packs two cities, three towns, 64 villages and more than 60 hamlets into about 453 square miles; Suffolk’s ten towns cover about 2,373.
• Outages are measured in days. Isaias: about 645,000 PSEG customer outages and eight days to full restoration (LIPA’s 30-day report).
• Water reaches low houses. Suffolk had its first-ever flash flood emergency on August 18–19, 2024, when the Stony Brook Mill Pond dam failed; more than 2,000 residents and business owners reported flood damage.
• Seasonal houses cluster east. A Town of Southampton planning study put seasonal housing at 35.2 per cent of the town’s stock against 7.3 per cent for Suffolk as a whole.

Methods that change from house to house

• Blown-in attic insulation. Ranch and cape attics are often filled deep with loose insulation. We run cable on top of the joists rather than buried in it, keep it clear of recessed light housings and bathroom fans, and put the insulation back level when we leave.
• Cedar shakes and shingles. Common from the North Shore to the Hamptons. Cameras go on a flat mounting block so the base sits true, with the screws through the block into the sheathing, and the cable entry sealed and flashed rather than caulked over a gap in the shingles.
• Vinyl and aluminium siding. Siding moves with temperature. A camera screwed tight through vinyl can crack it in the first cold snap; a mounting block fixed to the wall behind lets the siding float around it.
• Stucco and brick fronts. Found on many post-war Nassau houses and on Mediterranean-style houses farther out. We drill with masonry bits, use sleeved anchors and seal the hole before the camera base covers it.

The house decides the cable route

Our ranch sits on a concrete slab with no basement. How does Lorex cable get from the recorder to the eaves?

Through the attic. On a slab house the attic is the only open space that touches every outside wall, so it becomes the cable highway. The recorder goes in an interior closet or a utility room; one bundle of cable rises from it through the top of the closet wall into the attic, then each cable travels across the joists to a soffit above the camera spot and drops straight through to the camera.

The limits are attic access and headroom. A pull-down stair or a hatch big enough for a person, and enough height at the eaves to reach the soffit, make it a one-day job for four to six cameras. A hatch in a closet ceiling with eighteen inches of blown-in insulation and a shallow pitch takes longer, because the last few feet to each eave are worked from below with fish rods.

The one thing we never do on a slab house is run cables along the outside of the wall and under the eaves on clips. It works for a season, then sun, squirrels and gutter cleaning take their toll, and every cable is visible from the street.

Our cape has a finished upstairs with knee walls. Can cable run behind them to reach the cameras at each end of the house?

Usually, yes. The triangular space behind a cape’s knee walls runs the length of the house on both sides and is often reachable through a small access panel or a closet. Cable laid along the floor of that space reaches both gable ends and can drop into the first-floor walls below.

The catch is that in many capes the knee-wall space is closed off where a dormer interrupts it, and the small attic above the upstairs ceiling may have no access at all. We look for the panels first; where none exist we either fit a neat access hatch in a closet or route those cameras from the basement instead, up inside an outside wall to the first-floor eave.

Gable-end cameras on a cape sit high and see a long way down each side yard. They are often the best two cameras on the house, which is why it is worth the effort to reach them properly.

In a split-level, which of the half-floors makes the best home for the Lorex recorder?

The lowest level that is both heated and has never taken water — most often the den or family room level at grade, close to where the cable modem already comes into the house. The bedroom level is a poor choice, because a recorder there is the first thing a burglar finds; the garage is worse, for reasons of temperature.

Split-levels are built around one wall where the floors overlap. Cable travelling between levels goes through that wall or through the garage ceiling below the bedrooms, then fans out through the attic over the upper wing and the basement or crawl space under the lower one.

If the split-level has a sub-basement below the den, we check it for water marks before considering it. A dry sub-basement is a fine home for a recorder on a shelf; one with a sump pump is not.

Can the recorder sit in the attached garage or up in the attic, where the cables are easiest to reach?

We advise against both. Lorex’s own specification sheets for its recent NVRs give an operating range of 14°F to 131°F and 10 to 90 per cent relative humidity. An attached garage in a January cold snap and an unvented attic in a July heat wave are the two places in a Long Island house most likely to push a recorder outside that range, and hard drives age fastest at the extremes.

The attic and the garage make excellent cable routes. They are just poor rooms to live in. We run the cables through them and bring them down into a closet, a laundry room or a utility room inside the heated envelope, where the recorder, a small UPS and the router can sit together.

A PoE switch is a little more tolerant than a recorder, and in a large house we sometimes put one in a heated garage to shorten the runs to the backyard cameras. It still goes on a shelf, never on the floor, and never in an unheated space.

How are cameras fixed to cedar shakes, vinyl or stucco without causing a leak?

With a mounting block or junction box under every camera, and the cable entry sealed behind it. The block gives the camera a flat, solid base on a surface that is anything but flat, hides the connection from the weather and keeps the hole in the wall covered.

On shakes and shingles the block’s screws go through into the sheathing and the top edge is flashed or sealed so water running down the wall passes over it. On vinyl, the block is fixed to the wall behind the siding so the siding can expand and contract around it without cracking. On stucco we drill with a masonry bit and seal the hole before the block covers it.

Water, salt and the coast

Our South Shore house is in a FEMA flood zone. Where should the recorder and the network gear go?

Up. The rule we follow is that nothing that records goes below the highest water the house has seen, and on a property in a mapped flood zone that usually means off the basement and off the ground floor of a high ranch altogether. The Town of Babylon’s own flooding page explains that FEMA’s AE6 designation marks land less than six feet above sea level as prone to flooding; whatever the number on your flood map, the recorder belongs above it.

In practice the recorder moves to an upstairs closet or a high shelf in a first-floor utility room, the router comes with it, and the cable modem is moved or extended so the three can share one battery backup. The outside cameras do not care where the recorder lives, so long as each cable is within Lorex’s 328-foot limit, which on a Long Island lot it almost always is.

If the house floods anyway, a recorder on a high shelf is the one thing in the basement that still has the footage of the night the water came in, and still works the morning after.

How often should cameras on a bay-front or ocean-facing wall be rinsed and checked?

Every spring and every autumn is a sensible minimum, and after any storm that drives spray against the house. Salt dries on the lens as a haze that softens the picture and catches headlights at night, and on the mounting screws and bracket joints as the start of corrosion.

An IP67 rating, which many Lorex outdoor cameras carry, means the housing keeps water and dust out. It says nothing about salt crystals building up on the outside. A rinse with fresh water and a soft cloth on the lens, a look at the screws and bracket, and a check that the cable boot is still sealed take a few minutes per camera.

We use stainless fixings on waterfront walls from the start, and where a house faces open water we mount cameras under an overhang wherever the view allows, so rain does some of the rinsing and the spray does less of the damage.

Our house was raised after Sandy. Does the new crawl space or pier foundation change how the cameras are wired?

Yes, and mostly for the better. A raised house usually has an open, ventilated space under the living floor where the old basement used to be. Cable can run through it to every side of the house, but it has to be treated as outdoors: outdoor-rated cable, fixed up under the floor framing rather than lying on the ground, and protected where it rises past the flood vents.

The recorder stays upstairs in the living space, well above the design flood level the house was raised to. The cameras under the house — covering the parking area, the stairs and the storage space — are often the most useful ones, because that space is where bikes, kayaks and tools end up.

Many raised houses also have a long exterior staircase to the front door. A Lorex doorbell at the top of it sees faces; a wired camera at the foot of it sees who is coming up.

Can the Lorex recorder stay on all winter in a house where the heat is turned down to the minimum?

Yes, provided the thermostat stays above freezing and the recorder is in the heated part of the house. The 14°F lower limit Lorex prints for its recent recorders is far below any sensible winter setting, so a closed-up house kept at 50°F or so is comfortable for the equipment.

The risks at a winterised house are elsewhere. If the electricity is switched off at the panel to save money, the system stops; if the internet service is suspended for the season, remote viewing stops even though recording continues. We set up the recorder to send an alert when it loses contact with the app, and ask owners to keep the internet on through the off-season.

East End owners who close a house for the winter often want the cameras most in exactly those months. A recorder that is warm, powered, connected and on a battery backup is the whole answer.

The kit you already bought

We bought a Lorex kit at a warehouse club. What usually has to change before it fits a Long Island house?

Usually the cables, sometimes the camera mix, rarely the recorder. Kit cables come in fixed lengths with moulded ends; a run up through a split-level, across a ranch attic and down to a garage corner often needs a different length, and a cable with a moulded end will not fit through the small hole that a neat installation needs. We use bulk cable cut to length and terminate it in place, keeping the kit’s cables for short indoor runs.

The camera mix is the second thing. A kit holds four or eight of the same camera, but a Long Island house has spots that want different views: a wide angle over the back patio, a narrower one down the driveway, a camera that can cope with the glare of headlights from the street. We can install the kit as it is and suggest an extra or two, without pressing you to buy anything.

We also check that the recorder and cameras in the box are from the same Lorex family. Lorex warns that its cameras, recorders and apps are not always interchangeable, and a kit that has been added to over the years sometimes holds a camera that will not talk to the recorder.

Can two Lorex kits bought a year apart run on one recorder?

Often, but not always. Lorex has changed recorder lines and apps several times, and its compatibility pages say plainly that not every Lorex camera works with every Lorex recorder. Two IP kits from the same family usually combine well, with the cameras from the second kit plugged into free ports on the first recorder or a PoE switch beside it.

Mixing an older analogue (coaxial) kit with a newer IP kit is a different matter: the recorders work in different ways. In that case we choose one recorder to keep, usually the newer one, and either replace the older cameras or keep the old recorder running separately for a while.

Before you buy a second kit, send us the model number on the bottom of the recorder you have. We will tell you which Lorex cameras it accepts and how many channels are left.

Porches, driveways and the police

Packages keep disappearing from our front step. Is a Lorex doorbell enough, or does the porch need its own camera?

A doorbell alone is rarely enough. A doorbell camera looks straight out at face height, so it sees the visitor well and the package at their feet badly; a thief who comes from the side and stoops to pick up a box often appears as a shoulder and the top of a head. A wired camera mounted above and to one side of the door, looking down at the step, shows the box, the hands and the face as the person straightens up.

The scale of the problem on the Island is real. The Suffolk ring charged in November 2025 was accused of taking more than 200 phones and tablets from porches across 31 communities. Those were deliveries tracked by the thieves; ordinary parcels go just as easily.

Thieves on Long Island go after cars parked in driveways. Where does the camera need to be to see someone trying the door handles at night?

Low and close, not high on the roofline. A camera under a second-storey eave covering the whole driveway shows that someone was there; a camera at first-floor height on the garage corner or a porch post, aimed along the cars, shows who it was. We usually pair the two: one wide view for context, one tighter view at the driver’s door.

The January 2024 task force announcement described crews who spot expensive cars in driveways, then break into houses for the key fobs. That makes the side door and the door from the garage into the house as important as the cars themselves, and both should be in view.

Light matters too. A camera with a built-in spotlight or a nearby motion light records colour, which tells police the colour of a jacket or a car; pure infrared gives black-and-white. On a dark cul-de-sac we prefer colour.

Our police department runs a camera registry. Should we sign up, and what does it give them?

Signing up is voluntary and gives police a list, not a live feed. The Suffolk County Police Department’s Camera Registry Program records where residents and businesses have cameras so detectives know whom to ask for video after a crime; the department says footage is retrieved at the owner’s convenience. Garden City’s village police run a similar private camera registration and state plainly that it does not give them access to private systems.

For most homeowners the benefit is speed: if something happens on your street, a detective calls you rather than knocking on every door. The cost is that your address is on a list of camera owners, which some people would rather avoid.

Either way, we show you how to export a clip from the Lorex recorder to a USB stick before we leave, so that if anyone asks, you can hand it over in minutes without letting anyone into the house.

Shops, lots and loading doors

Can a Lorex camera at our strip-centre shop look out over the shared parking lot?

It can usually look at the spaces in front of your store and the walk to your door; whether it can be mounted outside at all depends on your lease. In most Long Island strip centres the landlord owns the façade, the canopy and the lot, and exterior cameras need written permission. Inside the glass, aimed out, is your own space.

A camera inside the front window has to fight reflections at night and glare in the afternoon. We mount it close to the glass with a hood, or high above the door where the canopy shades the view.

Will a camera watching our loading door be blinded by truck headlights backing in?

It can be, if it faces straight into them. The fix is aim first and settings second: mount the camera to the side of the door looking across the dock, not out from above it, so headlights cross the picture instead of shining into the lens.

Lorex cameras have settings to handle bright and dark parts of the same scene, and we tune them on site after dark with a vehicle in place. A second camera inside the door, looking out, catches what the outside camera misses.

“A store-bought Lorex kit includes everything you need”

The box includes a recorder, cameras and a cable for each one, and in a house with a full basement and an open attic it may genuinely be enough. Lorex sells a great many of these kits through Costco, as it says itself, and many end up on Long Island houses.

What the box cannot include is the route. A slab ranch needs every cable lifted into the attic; a cape needs access behind knee walls; a split-level needs a path between levels that do not stack neatly. Pre-made cables with moulded ends do not fit through small, neat holes, and the lengths rarely match the house.

So the kit is a good start, not a finished plan. Most of what we add is cable, mounting blocks and sealant, not more cameras.

“Wireless cameras mean no drilling in a finished house”

A Wi-Fi camera still needs power, from a plug, a battery or a solar panel, and a Wi-Fi signal strong enough at the mounting spot. On a brick-faced Nassau ranch or a high ranch with the router at the far end of the ground floor, that signal is often weak exactly where the camera is wanted.

Battery cameras record on motion rather than continuously and have to be taken down and charged. On a second-storey eave that means a ladder every few months, or a camera that quietly stops.

One cable through the attic and one small hole in the soffit is usually less disruption than it sounds, and it removes both problems for the life of the camera.

“Put the recorder anywhere out of sight — the attic is perfect”

Out of sight, yes; the attic, no. Lorex’s spec sheets for its recent recorders list an operating range of 14°F to 131°F and 10 to 90 per cent humidity. An unvented Long Island attic in July and an attached garage in January are the two places most likely to break those limits.

Basements bring a different risk on this Island. Suffolk’s first-ever flash flood emergency in August 2024 and the memory of Sandy along the South Shore mean a recorder on the basement floor can drown in a single night.

The right place is boring: a closet, a laundry room or a utility room in the heated part of the house, on a shelf, near the router.

“Outdoor cameras are weatherproof, so the coast is no problem”

Weatherproof ratings such as IP67 describe how well a housing keeps water and dust out. They do not cover salt crystals drying on the lens or creeping into screws and bracket joints over several seasons.

On canal-front houses in Massapequa or Freeport, harbour houses on the North Shore and summer places on the forks, the cameras that face open water need stainless fixings, a sealed cable entry and a rinse every spring and autumn.

Placement does more than any rating. A camera under an overhang facing along the house collects a fraction of the spray of one on an open wall facing the bay.

“You don’t need battery backup — outages are short”

Some are. LIPA’s report on Isaias counted about 645,000 customer outages in August 2020 and eight days before service was fully restored. A September 2026 coastal storm left thousands of customers dark across Huntington Station, Setauket, Bay Shore, Northport and Southampton.

A wired Lorex system draws its camera power from the recorder. When the recorder goes off, every wired camera goes off with it, at the moment an empty or dark house is most exposed.

No reasonable UPS covers eight days, but one sized for the recorder, router and modem carries the system through the short cuts that happen several times a year and the minutes before a standby generator starts.

“Installation costs $100 to $200 per camera”

Angi’s 2026 guide to camera installation gives that per-camera range for labour, charged in addition to buying the cameras. As a nationwide middle-of-the-road number for a straightforward house, it holds up.

It does not price a cable route through blown-in insulation over a slab, a recorder moved out of a flood-prone basement, or a doorbell transformer that has to be replaced. Those are normal Long Island tasks, and a national average smooths them away.

So we publish a fixed figure for the ordinary part of the job and list every Island-specific extra by name on the written quote, which you see before anyone picks up a drill.

“Home camera footage is shared with the police automatically”

Not with a Lorex system. Footage stays on the recorder in your house and in your app unless you choose to share it. Suffolk police run a voluntary camera registry that records where cameras are, and say footage is retrieved at the owner’s convenience; Garden City’s registration programme says outright that it gives police no access to private systems.

The confusion is understandable. Licence-plate reader networks have been in the Long Island news in 2026, with the New York Post reporting in August that Flock Safety cameras had been vandalised on the Island. Those are separate systems run for police and municipalities, not home cameras.

If you want to help investigators, the practical step is learning to export a clip to a USB stick. We show every owner how before we leave.

Beyond these six, Lorex calls come from every corner of both counties. In Nassau: Valley Stream, Elmont, Franklin Square, Hempstead, Freeport, Merrick, Wantagh, Massapequa, Hicksville, Syosset, Great Neck, Port Washington, Glen Cove and Oyster Bay. In Suffolk: Amityville, Lindenhurst, Babylon, Bay Shore, Brentwood, Commack, Huntington, Northport, Smithtown, Ronkonkoma, Patchogue, Shirley, Riverhead, Southold, the Hamptons and Montauk.

Already own a Lorex kit? Labour-only pricing

If the Lorex box is already in your hall closet, the bill is our time and nothing else: per camera, $230 in Nassau or $240 in Suffolk; for setting up the recorder, $173 or $180. Where a kit cable comes up short on the way through your attic, we cut a longer one from our own reel and mention it on the quote. Where you bought it does not matter. What does is that the recorder and cameras are one Lorex generation, so photograph the label under the recorder and send it to us before the visit.

Moving a recorder, replacing a doorbell transformer, trenching to a detached building or adding an outlet is priced after a walk-through and listed line by line in the written quote.