Lorex Cameras
Installed in
Orange County

If footage is needed for an inspector or the police, do these first

1. Do not unplug or reset the recorder. A factory reset can wipe users and settings, and a recorder that is switched off records nothing while it sits there.
2. Note the date and time you need, and check whether the clock on the recorder's screen matches your phone. If it is off, write down by how much.
3. Find a USB flash drive. Lorex recorders copy clips to a USB stick plugged into the front or back of the box; the stick is not included with the recorder.
4. Tell us how long the drive keeps footage. If you do not know, assume the oldest days are being overwritten now and call before anything else.

With that information we can usually save the clip by phone before a visit is even booked.

How the method changes from building to building

Builder houses after move-in. Most subdivision houses can be wired without opening a finished wall. The attic gives a route to every eave; the basement or garage ceiling reaches the front porch and the side door. We drop cable from the attic into the soffit behind each camera position and seal the entry, and where the siding is vinyl the camera sits on a mounting block that matches the siding profile, so it seals flat and the screws reach solid sheathing. The thing to settle before drilling is where the recorder lives, because the garage the builder chose for the network panel is the worst room in the house for a hard drive in a Hudson Valley August or January.

Houses still being framed. If the drywall is not up yet, call before it is. A home-run network cable from a recorder closet to each likely camera spot — each eave corner, the porch ceiling, over the garage doors, the back door — costs little while the walls are open, and the ends can be coiled and labelled behind a blank plate until the cameras arrive. We coordinate with the builder's electrician so the low-voltage cable keeps clear of power wiring and the recorder closet gets an outlet.

Older city and village buildings. In a Newburgh rowhouse or a Middletown two-family, plaster walls and solid masonry stop Wi-Fi and resist new cable. Stairwells, closets stacked floor over floor, the basement ceiling and the line where the old phone or cable TV wire already enters the building are the usual routes. Where the building is split between an owner and a tenant, the recorder belongs to the owner and goes in the owner's space, and we list which cameras each household may see before any setup.

Rental houses. A rental is designed from the outside in. We stand where a guest's car stops, where people walk from it, where the lake path or the side gate meets the yard, and where a second car would park if someone brought friends. Every one of those spots gets covered, and no camera looks through a window, into a hot tub enclosure or onto a neighbour's yard. The written camera list becomes part of the permit file and the listing disclosure.

Farms and outbuildings. Barns and equipment sheds that sit beyond one cable length use a PoE switch or long-range PoE extender in a weatherproof box, or a point-to-point wireless link to a small switch in the barn. Lorex lists 328 feet as the maximum Ethernet run between recorder and camera; we measure the lane before promising anything. The Hudson Valley Lorex page goes deeper on extenders and long links; on an Orange County farm the usual problem is simpler: the barn is on a separate meter, so the camera's power and the recorder's power fail at different times.

Short-Term Rentals Under Town Rules

Our Monroe rental needs a town permit — what does the camera part of the application actually ask for?

Four things, all written into the Town of Monroe's Local Law No. 1 of 2022. When the house is rented and the manager is not living there, the site has to be “digitally monitored” so the manager can check the number of guests and visitors against the permit and give the Building Inspector evidence if there is a complaint. The monitoring has to include outdoor cameras “adequate in number, location and view angle to monitor arrivals and departures.” Recordings have to be made whenever the property is rented and kept for at least 30 days, with copies to the inspector on request. And renters have to be told where the cameras are, what they are for, and whether any of them record sound.

The Village of Woodbury's 2024 short-term rental permit application repeats the same requirements almost word for word. Other places in the county regulate rentals without, as far as we have found, writing cameras into the text: the Town of Warwick has required a short-term rental permit under Chapter 129 since 2018, rewritten in 2023, and Cornwall-on-Hudson has posted proposed rules. Check the current law for your own town or village before you apply; the building department will have the latest version.

For a Lorex installation this translates into a short list we can document for the application: a camera plan showing each outdoor camera and what it sees, a recorder and drive that keep 30 days or more at the chosen settings, a written note that no camera has a microphone switched on (or which one does), and a description of how a clip is copied for the inspector. We give you that as a one-page attachment with photos of each camera's view.

Which doors, drives and paths count as “arrivals and departures” when a town requires them on camera?

Every way a person can reach the house and leave it without climbing a fence. On a typical Monroe or Woodbury rental that is the driveway entrance, the parking area, the front door, any side or basement door that guests can use, the deck stairs if they lead to a yard with its own gate, and on a lake house the path down to the water. The law's purpose is to count people, so a camera that sees cars but not the walk from the car to the door only does half the job.

This is different from how most hosts use cameras. One host on a hosting forum wrote that they have two cameras outside and “occasionally take a look” but do not monitor the number of guests. The Monroe wording asks for exactly that headcount, so we place cameras where faces and bodies pass at a predictable distance — a doorway, a gate, the narrowest point of a path — rather than one wide view of the whole yard where people become dots after dark.

In practice that usually means four to six cameras on a modest rental: one at the driveway mouth for vehicles, one covering the parking area and the walk, one at each door guests use, and one on any separate path. We mark each on a site sketch with its field of view so the inspector, and you, can see there is no unwatched way in.

The town wants thirty days of video kept — what does that mean for the recorder's hard drive?

It means the drive has to be sized for the way the cameras will actually record while guests are there, not for the default. Lorex's own help pages explain that recorders constantly overwrite the oldest footage when the drive fills, and its hard drive calculator works from resolution, frame rate, hours recorded per day and camera count — with a default of only two hours a day and motion recording estimated at around 120 thirty-second events per hour. A rental with cars and people moving all weekend does not fit those assumptions.

Because the Monroe and Woodbury rules ask for recordings “during times when the property is rented,” we normally set the arrival cameras to record continuously while a booking is active and size the drive so that 30 days of continuous recording on those cameras still leaves margin. On a five- or six-camera 4K system that often means a larger drive than the one in the box, or recording the main stream at a lower resolution on the wide views while the door cameras keep full detail.

At handover we check the oldest recording the recorder actually holds, rather than trusting a calculation, and write that date on the permit sheet. If the drive cannot reach 30 days at the settings you want, you will know before the inspector does.

Does Orange County's new short-term-rental registry say anything about cameras?

Not in the notice the county published. Local Law Introductory No. 7 of 2025 proposed making Orange County a “covered jurisdiction” under Article 12-D of the state Real Property Law and setting up a registration system for short-term rental units, with the Commissioner of Finance writing the details. A public hearing was set for October 27, 2025, at the County Executive's office in Goshen. The state law it ties into, section 447-c, is about registering hosts and units, not about equipment.

Camera rules, where they exist, come from the town or village, as in Monroe and Woodbury. A county registration does not replace a local permit, so a Monroe host would need both. If you are unsure which rules apply to your address, the town clerk or building department is the right first call; we can work from whatever they give you.

What a registry does change is visibility. Once rentals are listed with the county, a complaint is easier to trace to an owner, and an owner with recordings that show who came and went is in a stronger position than one without.

Guests, Privacy and What Must Never Be Recorded

Airbnb bans indoor cameras — does that rule out a doorbell camera or an outdoor camera that sees through a window?

The doorbell is allowed; the window view is not. Airbnb's help pages count doorbell cameras as recording devices that hosts may use outdoors if they are disclosed in the listing. But its rules, in force since April 30, 2024, forbid any device that monitors any part of a home's interior, and its announcement said outdoor cameras are “prohibited from monitoring indoor spaces.” A camera on the porch that looks through a glass storm door into the hall, or a yard camera that sees into a lit kitchen at night, crosses that line.

We check every view after dark, with the house lights on, because that is when windows become screens. Where a window falls in the frame we move the camera, change its angle, or use Lorex's privacy masking to black out that part of the picture permanently in the recording.

The same applies to a rental in a two-family house. A camera covering the shared entrance must not see into the guest apartment's door when it is open, and any camera inside the owner's own half has to be out of sight of the rented space entirely, or switched off and removed while the listing is active.

Do renters have to be told where the cameras are, and what changes if a camera has a microphone?

Yes, under both the town rules and the platforms. Monroe and Woodbury require notice of the location and purpose of the cameras, “as well as disclosure of audio recording if any.” Airbnb requires outdoor cameras to be disclosed in the listing before booking. We give you wording for both that matches the actual installed positions, such as “cameras cover the driveway, parking area, front door and lake path; no cameras record sound.”

Audio is the harder part. Many Lorex cameras and every Lorex doorbell have a microphone. New York's eavesdropping law, Penal Law section 250.05, makes mechanically overhearing a conversation without a participant's consent a felony, and Lorex's own FAQ says audio monitoring is not legal everywhere. Guests talking on a deck are not consenting by staying.

Our default on rental cameras is microphones off in the recorder and in the app, noted in the handover sheet, so the disclosure can honestly say no sound is recorded. If you want two-way talk on the doorbell for check-in, we set it up so it works only when you press to speak, and you disclose it.

A hot tub, outdoor shower or fire pit is part of the rental — can any camera cover it?

Not the private parts of it. Airbnb's rules name the inside of an enclosed outdoor shower and a sauna as places hosts may not point cameras, and a hot tub screened by a fence or enclosure falls in the same category of greater privacy. New York's unlawful-surveillance law also defines places where people can reasonably expect to undress in privacy. No camera goes there under any circumstances.

What you can usually cover is the approach. A camera that watches the path or gate leading to the deck shows who went there and when, which is what matters for a noise or occupancy complaint, without seeing anyone in the water. An open fire pit area in the middle of the yard is generally visible from a camera covering the yard, but we keep it out of close-up framing.

If you are unsure about a particular spot, leave it uncovered. A missing camera angle is a small gap; a camera in the wrong place can end a listing and expose the owner to a claim.

Proving What Happened

A neighbour complained about a party at our rental — how do we show the building inspector who arrived and when?

By pulling a short, time-stamped sequence from each arrival camera for the night in question and copying it to a USB stick at the recorder. Lorex recorders back up selected clips from the playback screen to a USB flash drive plugged into the recorder, and that is usually the fastest route; the app can also save clips to a phone, but a copy taken straight from the recorder, with its own time stamp, is the one to hand an official. Start with the driveway camera to count vehicles, then the door camera to count people, and note the times.

The Monroe and Woodbury rules exist for exactly this: the recordings are there to give the inspector evidence when he or she investigates a complaint. Hosts on forums say the same in plainer words — outdoor cameras help them catch guests who bring extra people. A clear sequence showing eight people arriving for a six-person booking resolves the question either way.

If the night in question is close to the end of your retention window, copy it first and review it later. We can do the export on a service visit or walk you through it by phone; the handover sheet we leave at installation has the steps for your recorder model.

Our recorder's clock is a few minutes off — does that matter if footage ends up with the town or a court?

It matters more than most owners expect. A complaint says the music was loud at 11:40 p.m.; if the recorder's clock runs eight minutes slow, the clip you hand over appears to show a quiet yard at that time, and the other side will say the footage is unreliable. A recorder that lost power and came back with the wrong date can make a whole weekend look as if it never happened.

At installation we set the time zone, switch on automatic network time so the recorder corrects itself from the internet, and confirm daylight-saving changes are handled. At handover we compare the on-screen time with a phone and note it on the sheet. After a long power cut, check the clock on the recorder before you rely on any clip from that period.

When you export a clip for anyone official, write down the time shown on the recorder and the actual time at the moment you export it. If there is a difference, saying so up front keeps the footage credible.

Should the rental's cameras record all the time or only on motion when guests are in?

For the arrival cameras at a permitted rental, all the time while a booking is active. Lorex's recorder guides show how to choose continuous or motion recording per camera and set a weekly schedule by dragging across the days in the recording settings. Motion recording saves space, but it can miss the first second of an arrival, skip a person who stands still at the door, and leave gaps that look odd to someone checking a complaint. The town wording asks for recordings while the property is rented, which continuous recording satisfies without argument.

Between bookings, when you or a cleaner are at the house, you can switch to motion recording or a schedule that suits you. Some owners keep continuous recording year-round and buy the drive to match; others prefer the schedule. Either works if the drive still reaches the required 30 days in the busiest period.

Commuter Houses Empty From Dawn to Dark

We leave for an early train and get home after dark — which Lorex alerts are worth receiving at work?

Very few, and only for people. With a 35-minute average commute, many Orange County households are away for ten or eleven hours. If every passing car or blowing branch reaches your phone, you will mute the app by the second week. On Lorex wired cameras that support it, person and vehicle detection lets you limit alerts to people at the doors and vehicles entering the driveway, and motion zones keep the road and the neighbour's lot out of the picture.

We usually set two levels. During working hours, a person at any door or a vehicle stopping in the driveway sends an alert. Overnight, when everyone is home, only the back door and the garage side send alerts, so a late delivery does not wake anyone. Everything still records; the alerts are just a filter.

The test is whether you would act on it. If an alert would not make you open the app and look, it should not be an alert. We review the first week's alerts with you and trim them.

Can the system let us know the kids got in the door after school?

Yes, in a simple way. A camera or doorbell at the door the children use, with person detection and an alert schedule covering the after-school window, sends a notification with a snapshot when someone arrives. You see who came in and when, without anyone having to text you.

What the system will not do is recognise which child it was or confirm the door was locked behind them. If that matters, a smart lock with its own entry log or individual codes does the second part, and we can install one at the same visit.

Some mornings the garage door gets left open in the rush to the train — can the cameras catch that?

They can show it, if one camera is aimed for it. A camera on the driveway side, or inside the garage looking at the overhead door, shows at a glance whether the door is up. Check the live view from the platform or the office and you know in seconds, without waiting for anything to happen.

What a Lorex camera does not do on its own is announce that a door has been open for twenty minutes; its alerts are about people and vehicles moving, not about a door that is standing still. If you want a reminder, a person or vehicle alert on a garage camera during working hours will tell you when someone walks in, and a separate smart garage-door controller can report the door's position directly. We can wire the camera and leave room on the circuit for the controller.

New Construction and Builder Houses

Our house is still being framed — what should go into the walls now so Lorex cameras can be added later?

One network cable from a single equipment closet to every likely camera position, each run unbroken, labelled at both ends and left coiled behind a blank plate or in the eave. Typical positions on a two-storey house are each front and rear corner under the eave, the porch ceiling, above the garage doors, the back door and the side or mudroom door, plus one for a doorbell. Lorex's PoE cameras take power and video over that single cable, so nothing else needs to be run to the camera.

The closet matters as much as the cables. It should be inside the conditioned part of the house, have an outlet, and be close to where the internet arrives, or have its own cable to the internet provider's equipment. A recorder in a heated and cooled closet lasts longer than one in a garage or attic.

We coordinate with the builder and electrician, keep the low-voltage runs away from power cables, and leave a drawing of where every cable ends. Cameras can then be added in stages without opening a wall.

Should the builder's electrician run the camera cable, or someone who installs cameras?

Either can pull cable; the difference is who knows where the cameras will end up and who stands behind the result. An electrician's crew wiring a whole house will run whatever the plan shows, but camera positions on a builder's plan are often guesses, and a cable that lands six inches from where a camera needs to sit can mean a new hole in finished siding later. A camera installer places each end for the view it has to give — the porch from the corner, the driveway mouth, the side door at head height.

Whoever runs it, ask for three things. Each cable should be one continuous run from the equipment closet to the camera spot, with no splices in the walls. Each end should be labelled and recorded on a drawing. And each run should be tested end to end before the drywall goes up, because a nicked cable behind a finished wall is the most expensive kind to fix.

We are happy to work beside the builder's electrician: they handle the outlets and the recorder closet's power under the county electrician licence, and we pull and test the low-voltage camera runs.

Our street is still a construction site — is a camera worth installing before the neighbouring houses are finished?

Often yes, and for your house rather than the builder's lots. While a subdivision is being built, trucks and crews you do not know are on the street every day, materials are delivered to open sites, and finished houses sit next to empty ones at night. A driveway camera and a door camera on your own house give you a record of who stopped at your property without trying to watch the whole street.

Aim at your driveway and doors, not at the lots next door. New York's Civil Rights Law section 52-a gives a homeowner a right to sue someone who installs a device on adjoining property to record their backyard without consent, and the house going up beside you will soon be someone's home. Motion zones that cut out the neighbouring lots also keep construction traffic from filling your alerts.

Shops, Restaurants and Warehouse Units

What should a restaurant's cameras see so that a break-in video actually identifies someone?

A face, at close range, at the door that gets forced. In the Newburgh restaurant burglary ABC7 covered in December 2025, the video showed the burglar behind the bar and showed the crowbar on the front door — useful, but a camera aimed across a room usually records a figure, not a face. The cameras that identify people are the ones mounted at about head height or just above, a few metres from an entrance, looking at the spot where a person has to stop or turn.

For a typical Orange County restaurant or shop we put one camera inside each entrance looking at it, one over the register or bar looking at the person standing there, one on the back or delivery door, and a wide view for context. The wide view tells the story; the door cameras give the police something to work with.

Then protect the recording. The same burglar took the payment terminal and an iPad from behind the bar; a recorder left on a shelf behind the counter can go the same way. Put it in a locked office, a ceiling space or a lockbox, and let the monitor stay out front if you want customers to see it.

Our landlord's cameras already cover the outside of the building — is a Lorex system inside our unit still worth it?

Usually, because the landlord's cameras answer the landlord's questions. In a flex or warehouse building along Route 17K or I-84, the owner's system typically watches the lot, the truck court and the building entrances. It rarely sees inside your office, your stock cage or your dock door from the inside, and getting footage from it means asking the property manager, on their schedule.

A Lorex system of your own covers your doors from inside, your counter or desk area, your high-value stock and the dock or roll-up door, recorded on a recorder you control. Check your lease first: some require landlord approval for any drilling or cabling, and some limit cameras that face common areas. We supply an insurance certificate for the landlord if they ask.

1. “Camera installation around Newburgh costs about $100”

Thumbtack's Newburgh page says installation can run “anywhere from $100 for a single-camera line installation to $1,000-$2,200 for an entire system.” That is a fair description of a marketplace where prices vary with the installer and the job, and the low end is a single short line with the camera already in hand.

Our Orange County prices are built differently: a four-camera Lorex system at $2,175 includes the recorder, the cameras, cable within reach of the recorder and setup, and labour alone on your own equipment is $280 per wired camera. That labour figure is our base labour rate with the county's 1.40 factor applied.

The bigger difference for a rental or a business is what the price has to cover: a drive that holds a required number of days, cameras placed for a town inspector, and a documented export. Ask any quote, ours included, to say which of those it includes.

2. “The drive that comes in the kit holds about a month”

Sometimes, under the assumptions printed on the box. Lorex's own hard drive calculator starts from two recorded hours a day and estimates motion recording at around 120 thirty-second events per hour, and Lorex's help pages note that recorders overwrite the oldest footage once the drive is full.

A Monroe or Woodbury rental must keep recordings from every rented period for at least 30 days. Arrival cameras running continuously through a busy summer fill a drive far faster than two hours a day of motion clips.

The only reliable answer is to size the drive for your actual settings and then check the oldest recording on the recorder a few weeks after installation. We do the first check at handover and show you where to look.

3. “Indoor cameras are allowed at a rental if guests are told”

That used to be Airbnb's rule. Its own announcement explains that it historically allowed indoor cameras in common areas such as hallways and living rooms if they were disclosed and visible.

Since April 30, 2024 the rule is the opposite: no security cameras or recording devices may monitor any part of a home's interior, even if they are turned off or disconnected. Outdoor cameras remain allowed with disclosure, and noise decibel monitors that do not record sound are allowed indoors outside bedrooms and bathrooms.

For an Orange County host that means taking down any indoor camera the house came with, not just switching it off, and relying on outdoor arrival cameras for the evidence the town wants.

4. “A video doorbell is enough to monitor a rental”

It is a good start and the easiest camera to install, which is why it is usually the first one a host buys. It shows whoever comes to the front door and lets you talk to a guest at check-in.

But the Monroe and Woodbury wording asks for outdoor cameras adequate in number, location and view angle to monitor arrivals and departures. A doorbell sees one door from one angle; it does not see the driveway, the side door, the deck stairs or the path to the lake, which is where extra guests usually come and go.

5. “Cameras are low voltage, so no electrician is ever involved”

The camera cable is low-voltage work, and we do it under NYS low-voltage license #12000287431. Lorex's PoE cameras take their power from the recorder, so most cameras need no outlet at all.

The recorder, a PoE switch in a barn or a floodlight camera on its own circuit do need power, and in Orange County new outlets and circuits are electrical work under the county licence administered from Goshen, or under the City of Middletown's own board inside the city. A version of the county law we reviewed also requires electrical work that needs a building permit to be inspected by a certified electrical inspector.

So the honest answer is: usually no electrician for the cameras, sometimes one for the outlet. Our quote says which, and a licensed electrician does that part.

6. “Battery cameras are the easy answer for a rental or a far shed”

Easy to mount, yes. Lorex's own battery-camera guides say battery life runs about four to six months depending on temperature and motion settings, and that cold temperatures reduce the battery's capacity.

A camera that has to show every arrival for 30 days should not be the one that goes quiet in February when a guest arrives for a winter weekend. Battery cameras also tend to wake on motion rather than record all the time, which leaves gaps a complaint can fall into.

We use them for a dock, a shed or a spot no cable can reach, and keep the arrival cameras the permit depends on wired to the recorder.

7. “Remote viewing just works once the app is installed”

Not always, and commuters notice first. Lorex's Fusion system listing says remote access requires the recorder to be connected to the router by cable and recommends at least 6 Mbps of upload speed; a recorder on a weak Wi-Fi link to the router may record perfectly and still fail to stream to a phone in Manhattan.

Lorex also publishes three apps — Lorex Connect, Lorex Classic and Lorex Pro — and which one works depends on the recorder. An owner who downloads the wrong one sees a sign-in screen that never connects.

We wire the recorder to the router, check the upload speed the internet plan actually delivers, install the right app on each phone and test it on cellular data before we leave, so the first time you check from the train is not the first time it has been tried.