Plan camera positions around how people actually enter your house, so the footage shows faces, not rooftops.
On a landed house, put cameras where people actually enter: the gate and driveway, the porch and front door, the back or kitchen door, any side lane, and the ground-floor windows that are out of sight from the street. Mount each one out of easy reach but low enough to see faces, aim it along the path people walk rather than straight down, keep bright sky and street lights out of the frame, and shelter it under the eaves. Plan the recorder position and cable routes first; ClickBina's CCTV cost guide lists market cabling at RM150 – RM250 per point in surface trunking and RM250 – RM500 per point concealed (2026, Klang Valley).
Every camera does one of two jobs. An overview camera shows what happened: a car arriving, someone walking through the porch, a parcel being taken. An identification camera shows who it was, which means a face or a number plate large enough in the frame to recognise. One wide camera cannot do both well. Most houses need a couple of identification positions at the entrances and overview cameras for the rest.
Write down, for each position, what you want to be able to see in the footage the morning after an incident. That list decides the camera count, the lens and the height far better than a package of four or eight cameras does. Our guide to camera types explains which shape suits which job.
| Position | What it should see | Usual job |
|---|---|---|
| Main gate and driveway | Anyone or any car coming through the gate | Identification of faces and plates at the gate |
| Porch and car park | The cars, the porch floor and anything left there | Overview |
| Front door | Faces of people at the door | Identification, close to the door |
| Back door or kitchen door | The back lane or yard approach | Identification or overview |
| Side lane (corner and end lots) | The whole length of the side passage | Overview along the lane |
| Ground-floor windows out of street view | Anyone at those windows | Overview |
| Upper floor or balcony reachable from a porch roof | The roof and balcony approach | Overview |
Burglars in terrace houses often come from the back lane or over a porch roof, not through the front gate. Our burglar-proofing checklist walks through those weak points; the cameras should watch the same ones.
A camera mounted too low can be knocked off aim, covered or stolen. One mounted too high sees only the tops of heads and caps. The working compromise is above head reach, typically under the porch ceiling or the eaves, angled so that faces are seen from the front rather than from directly above.
For the front door, a camera at the side of the door or on the porch ceiling a little way out, looking back at the door, catches faces better than one right above the door looking down. At the gate, a camera on the house wall looking out towards the gate gets people as they approach and turn.
People are easiest to recognise when they walk towards the camera. Aim cameras along the path people take, from the gate to the door or down a side lane, rather than across it, where they pass through the frame in a moment. Cover each entrance from inside the compound looking out, so the image shows the person's face as they come in.
Light causes more useless footage than cheap cameras do. A camera looking out of a dark porch towards a bright street or sky turns every visitor into a silhouette. Where you cannot avoid it, choose a camera with strong backlight handling and angle it slightly down so the sky is out of the frame.
At night, most cameras switch to infrared. The infrared light bounces off anything close to the lens, such as an eave, a wall, a gutter or a grille, and washes out the image. Mount the camera so nothing sits close in front of or beside it, and keep spider webs off the lens: a web lit by infrared can trigger motion recording all night. A porch or gate light that stays on makes a big difference to night images.
Malaysian weather is hard on outdoor cameras. Mount them under an eave or a porch roof wherever you can, so rain does not sit on the lens and afternoon sun does not bake the housing. Seal the cable entry into the wall and use a junction box at each camera so water cannot run down the cable into the connection. Our guide to CCTV going offline when it rains explains why wet joints fail.
Long outdoor cable runs also pick up lightning surges. Cameras on the gate or a fence post are the most exposed; see our CCTV lightning and surge guide.
Point cameras at your own property. A camera that looks straight into a neighbour's window, car porch or garden causes disputes quickly, and in a terrace row the views overlap easily. Most cameras let you mask part of the image so the neighbour's side is blacked out while your gate stays in view. If you live in a gated and guarded scheme or a strata development, check the house rules on cameras facing common areas.
Decide where the recorder lives before deciding where the cameras go, because every wired camera needs a cable back to it. Put it indoors, somewhere a burglar will not find it in the first minute, with a power point nearby and, ideally, a small UPS so it keeps recording through a power cut; our home UPS guide covers that.
Cable routes set most of the installation cost. Runs along the porch ceiling or under the eaves in surface trunking are quick; runs concealed in walls look neater but mean cutting and making good. Keep the recorder central so no run is unnecessarily long. How many days of footage you keep is a separate decision about the hard disk; see our recording days guide.
ClickBina publishes no CCTV package price. These are market ranges quoted in ClickBina's CCTV installation cost guide (2026, Klang Valley); camera positions affect them directly, because each position is a cable run.
| Cabling work | Market range | When it applies |
|---|---|---|
| Cabling in surface / PVC trunking | RM150 – RM250 per point | Runs along ceilings, beams and eaves at accessible heights |
| Cabling concealed in the wall | RM250 – RM500 per point | Wall cut, conduit laid and re-plastered |
| Drilling through brick or concrete | RM50 – RM120 per hole | Where a run crosses a structural wall |
WhatsApp us your job details for a quote — we reply within the hour.
💬 WhatsApp for a quoteA plan that clusters cameras near the recorder costs less than one that spreads them to every corner of a corner lot. Before asking for quotes, mark the positions on a simple floor plan so every installer prices the same layout.
WhatsApp us your job details for a quote: the house type, the areas you want covered and where the recorder could go. ClickBina is an experienced KL & Selangor contractor for whole-house refurbishment and trade coordination, so if you are renovating, cable routes for cameras can be planned before the ceiling and walls are closed up. We reply within the hour, and the price we agree is a flat price with no hidden charges. A site visit is RM150, waived if you go ahead.
How we estimated prices: every RM figure on this page is quoted unchanged from the ClickBina CCTV cost guide, where they are published as market ranges for 2026 in the Klang Valley.
WhatsApp us your job details for a quote — we reply within the hour.
💬 WhatsApp for a quoteTell us what you need — we reply within the hour.