Camera and Smart Plugs: How We Secure Our Warehouse Outside Business Hours

In the evenings and on weekends, our warehouse sits empty — full shelves, the packing table, several thousand euros’ worth of stock just sitting there. A classic alarm system with a monitoring service was high on our list early on. What we actually ended up installing is a lot smaller.

Why a classic alarm system didn’t work out for us

We got quotes from two local alarm companies — both with installation costs in the low thousands and a monthly fee for connection to an emergency call center. For a single warehouse room with no foot traffic, that was way out of proportion to the actual risk. What we were missing wasn’t a professional monitoring service, just a reliable notification when something’s moving in the warehouse at night.

The camera: not for evidence footage, but for the push notification

We installed two NestCam Indoor cameras — one facing the entrance door, one covering the packing table where the more valuable small-parts stock sits. Motion detection can be split into zones, so the camera at the door doesn’t trigger on every change in light outside. Because recordings land locally on a microSD card, we don’t need a cloud subscription just to get alerted — that mattered to us mainly because we only want to actually review footage in an emergency, not on a regular basis.

Smart plugs: the underrated part of the setup

The HomeLink smart plug 4-pack isn’t a security device in the strict sense, but it rounds out the setup in a useful way. The label printer is plugged into one of the outlets and gets automatically switched off on a schedule every evening — a device left running overnight never quite sat right with us for fire-safety reasons. If the camera sends a motion alert at night, we can also switch on the warehouse lights remotely through the app before anyone even drives over.

What we deliberately didn’t do

Both the camera and the smart plugs run on their respective manufacturers’ Wi-Fi cloud, not on a local Zigbee or Matter hub. For two or three devices in a single warehouse room, setting up a separate hub system wasn’t worth the effort to us — that calculation would change if a lot more smart devices got added.

Bottom line

For a fraction of the cost of a professional alarm system, this at least answers the question that kept us up at night: is someone in the warehouse right now who shouldn’t be? For our size, that’s enough — at a larger site with more stock value, we’d probably revisit the professional alarm system question.