New Video – Ring Indoor Cam Setup (With No Internet In Garage!)

I recently bought a Ring Indoor Cam for £15 as part of an Amazon bundle deal, and I wanted to wall mount this in my garage to detect would-be burglars.

However there’s one big flaw in my plan: I don’t have any internet in my garage. As a result, I wanted to shoot this full, end-to-end setup guide showing how I got internet in my garage, then how I setup and wall mounted my Ring Indoor Cam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDXneJVh91w

Feel free to jump to a specific part of this setup guide; the timings are:

• Step 1 – networking – 4:07
• Step 2 – setup Ring cam – 6:23
• Step 3 – wall mounting – 12:22
• Step 4 – testing – 16:03
• Step 5 – final notes – 18:06

Router setup instructions

As mentioned in the video, I wanted to give the specific router setup steps for my router – the BT HomeHub 6. I originally followed the guides at https://owenkelly.uk/projects/using-a-bt-home-hub-as-a-wireless-extender/ and http://unixetc.co.uk/2014/03/04/reuse-a-spare-bt-home-hub-as-a-wireless-access-point/, but in the end it was still temperamental.

But the guide on the BT forums (https://community.bt.com/t5/BT-Devices/BTHub6-Smart-Hub-As-WiFi-Extender-or-AP-Access-Point-amp-HH5/td-p/1675678) mentioned to also turn off the firewall, which is what resolved all my issues.

Hence in the end I had to:

• Turn off DHCP (both options, under ‘IPv4 Configuration’).
• Turn off the firewall (under ‘firewall’).
• Changed the default gateway (under ‘IPv4 Configuration’) to 192.168.1.10 – outside the main router’s DHCP range. I verified that this IP address wasn’t already in use by doing a quick ping.

Video Transcript

Hey YouTube, I’m Tristan from Smart Home Point. I recently bought a Ring indoor camera. My plan with this is to put it in my garage and use it as a security camera, So basically I’m going to be putting – mounting it – on the back wall, as you can see here. It will be facing out towards the front of my garage, and basically if I see – if I get motion alerts – especially at night or during the day when I’m usually at work, or might be out, then that could be an intruder, and as a result I’m going to look at that motion alert in more detail. I might make use of the motion stews feature as well, so daytime, during the weekends – when I tend to go in my garage – I won’t actually get alerted to motion because that might not be useful, but at all other times I listen to the motion alerts in case it is an intruder. So that’s my general plan, and as you can see, I’ve also got power in my garage so that’ll work really well, other than the one fundamental flaw in my plan: which is I don’t have any internet in my garage!

My previous video however covered seven different ways of how to get internet in an out building when you don’t previously have internet there, and I spoke through a few different methods that you can use. The method which I decided upon for myself is to use powerline adapters. So the way the powerline adapters work is they plug into a wall socket, and they have ethernet ports on the top or the bottom, and basically inside my house what I’m going to do is I’m going to plug this into the wall socket near my internet router. I’m going to plug an ethernet cable into the top, and then another one into the back of my internet router. What I’ll then do is I’ll go over to my garage, and I will plug a similar powerline adapter in to a wall socket in my garage, and then I will plug this again into an ethernet port. And from there I will plug that into one of the LAN cables in – here – in the garage.

Okay what that actually does is, these powerline adapters use the electricity and the electrical cables in your house – and running into your garage – to actually provide you with internet on the other end. So this is a really nice method because you don’t have to run loads of cables all throughout your house. And this is also quite cheap because you’re reusing your existing cabling and your existing house’s internet so you don’t have to go out and get another internet plan. Once this is all hooked up, which should be fairly straightforward, the last thing I need to do is sort out my internet router so that it can actually provide internet, and act as an access point in my garage. The way I’ll do this is I’m going to use an old router that I have from when I upgraded to my internet package (and hence I had a new router). So I’m going to get a router, I’m going to do a factory reset on it, and there’s two main things you need to do.

The first thing is you need to turn off is DHCP on the router. The reason for that is that DHCP is the technology which allocates and manages IP addresses of devices connected to your internal network, but I don’t want DHCP running on this router in my garage because, like, that would mean I have two DHCP services running, and they would clash so I need to turn DHCP off on this router, and then I would just have the one DHCP service running on my main router. The next thing I need to do is make sure that the IP address – or the default gateway – of this router is different to my main one. If they’re the same thing, which they will be – or very likely will be – if it’s the same manufacturer of the router, if they’re the same then the IP addresses will clash and this won’t work or it will produce unexpected results. So I’m going to go and do this now. I won’t show how to actually turn off DHCP and change the default gateway on this particular router, because your router will probably be different and even if you have a BT router the, ways that you actually change things inside the admin console will vary per version. I will… what I’ll do is put details in the description for this particular type of BT home hub, but in general the best thing to do if you want to follow this process is to actually Google how you turn off DHCP and how you change the default gateway for your particular router.

So to get started I plugged in the router to my laptop after doing a factory reset. I disabled DHCP, I changed the default gateway, and I also had to disable the firewall which I hadn’t expected to do, but then at that point the router was ready to go and ready to test. So in a separate point in my house, I plugged into the home network via the ethernet cable you can see on the left, and then I connected it to the router wirelessly – or you know over wi-fi – uhm, and it worked fine. I could surf the internet and manage the router, so then moved on to getting the powerline adapters setup. So you can see here, in my living room I’ve got it plugged in. Uhm, I got an ethernet cable going down into one of the LAN ports of my router. You can see on the right here – this one – so that’s plugged in, and then if I just put my router up, it’s still rebooting, and it’s now a success and the powerline adapter is working, and this is part of the home network. At least inside it is, and you can see some lights on the router itself, on the powerline, saying that. Then in the garage, I’ve done the same thing. I plugged in the powerline adapter here, you can see the lights showing successful, and then I’ve got an ethernet cable coming down and into the back of this BT router.

Now this BT router is flashing purple, that’s actually normal with BT routers, although it’s actually set up and it’s a working access point – wireless access point – it just flashes purple because it’s not connected to the internet. Uhm, also please excuse all the dust I’ve been cutting paving slabs in my garage and I haven’t cleaned up! But, uhm, there we are, that’s ready to go. That looks to be all working, despite the purple flashing light, so the next thing to do is test it out. So while in my garage, I went onto my phone, I went to connections and wi-fi. I previously already connected to it, um but just to demonstrate I turn on… uhm, I connect – auto connect, rather… to the wi-fi network, the access point from the router, and it says it’s connected which is a great sign! So then the next thing I do is go on to the internet, and I make sure that I can refresh, which is good. Now go to a brand new website as well, and it also loads, so that’s brilliant. It shows the wireless access point in my garage is working, and I now have wi-fi in my garage.

Okay so the next step is actually to set up my Ring indoor cam, you can see the box here. So I’ll just open it up and you can see the Ring indoor cam there. Let’s take the little blue instruction label off. So also in the box, in addition to the indoor cam, is this blue mounting and power supply box. so let’s go into there now, and you’ve got the power cable, and a few other stuff came out there as well. But that’s fine, they’re just different uhm power adapters for different countries. In addition you’ve also got this mounting kit for the Ring cam if you want to wall mount it, which I do, which comes onto the back bracket here (which I’ll look at later on). But for now I put on the UK power adapter because obviously I’m in the UK, put that plug that in, and then in the back here you can see where this goes, so I’ll just unwind this cable. You get around two or three meters worth of cable as well which is pretty generous, um so I can actually run this to the middle of my garage which is quite nice – at the middle wall of my garage without any extension leads – that’s quite nice. It’s a tangled mess at this stage, please bear with me. Olease also ignore all the dust on my fridge freezer as well! Right, let’s plug that in… actually it’s a chest freezer but that’s not important.

All right, so let’s plug that in now, let’s put the power on right now. To begin, with nothing actually happens and that’s because you’ve actually gotta click the power button – up here – on the top. You can see there, once that’s clicked, the blue light comes on and it says “say hello to Ring; follow the instructions in the Ring app to continue”. Okay, so I’ll now switch to the Ring app. So here it is: the Ring app, I’ll go into that on my phone. I’ve already previously got a Ring device so I don’t – I’ve already got an account but if you haven’t you’d have to set that up – but in this case, I’ll go to the menu and set up a device now. That’s the camera I want, so I’ll go to security cams and I need to scan the QR code on the back of the device. So it’s worth doing this before you will mount the device. So yes, I wanted that location, which I’ll just blank as it’s my home address. I’ll give it a name as well… I’ll say garage. Okay, and at this point it’s a case of just following the instructions and your Ring camera will be speaking to you as well. Uhm, so here it is. Firstly it says let’s plug in your indoor cam, which is all done. I’ve waited 30 seconds, let’s continue. Uhm, wait for your ‘stick-up cam’ to enter setup mode, which you’ll see by the blue flashing light. Because it’s flashing I’ll obviously click that, I need GPS on my phone so let’s turn that on. Let’s continue. Okay so it’s now set… connecting to the wi-fi, which probably won’t work because my Ring doorbell pro is set up on a different wi-fi network. There we are, so that’s what wi-fi my Pro is connected on so it’s saying do I want to connect to that, which I wouldn’t be able to because I can’t connect to it for my garage. So I’ll click on no, I’ll go to my wi-fi access point that I hooked up before, which is the first one at the top. It’ll be connected on 2.4 Ghz, because the Ring indoor camera doesn’t support 5 Ghz. So I just skipped ahead there, but I entered my wi-fi password. Okay and at this point it’s just connecting the Ring indoor cam to that wi-fi network, as you can see it takes a few moments. This is not too long though… this is almost there… brilliant there we are.

So it’s now connected to the wi-fi network and the app can see that, and you can see straight away Alex has connected the Garage to the Alexa skill as well, which is great. I also want snapshot capture, which I’ll turn on and set up outside this video. So there we are brilliant, it’s all set up which is great. At this stage then there’s some more instructions that Ring show you such as showing you how to wall mount, which I’ll look at later so I’ll skip the tutorial. Under additional settings it asks you if you want to share the device which I’ll go ahead and do. I’ll skip ahead… there you are… so I sent an invite to my wife. Uhm, linked devices is also really cool. So if, uhm, motion is detected in my garage, it can automatically start recording in my Ring doorbell pro and any other Ring devices I’ve got, and vice versa as well. So it’s a really nice feature. Again I’ll set that up offline. So for now I’ll just skip ahead, and then obviously I’ve got a 30 day trial of my Ring protect plan. It’ll keep bugging me, but I’ll wait until the end of the trial before I actually pay for the plan. Okay so I’ll go back in and there we are, you can see the garage at the bottom. Right, now you can’t see the feed and that’s because my Ring indoor cam is still in… setup mode, as you can see, and there’s a little message that just says it’s doing an update. It takes a few minutes, so don’t worry about that. I’ll skip ahead, because I randomly received a motion alert in my Ring camera which suggests that the camera’s set up.

And there you are, you can see some dodgy person in the garage. There he is again, some dodgy thief, let’s Ring the police. Oh no sorry, that’s me! But anyway, you can see it actually works, and if we go to live as well, we should get the video feed from my garage – which is using my wi-fi access point. There, yeah that’s brilliant, so again you got this dodgy thief… we really need to ring the police on the dodgy guy… but anyway, that’s all set up which is brilliant and I can also move the Ring indoor camera around to actually get a better view of my garage. Hello, that’s me! It’s 30 degrees celsius, I’m absolutely baking and warm while doing this, hence all the sweat – sorry about that!

But anyway, the point of this is that I can actually move my camera around now and actually see the best position for my Ring indoor cam. Other than that it’s all set up which is brilliant. Now that I’ve determined the best place for it, I can start wall mounting. So the first thing I’m going to do is remove the bracket at the bottom. It comes off quite easily, and then basically in the back – instead – you can insert this in the back, so you can remove the screw from here, so I’ll just do that as well. [Background noise] Okay so with that removed, you can actually now insert this… uhm, well you can firstly take off the back bracket that will go onto the wall, you can see there go on to the wall and then the other part will actually hook in over it, so it’ll be attached to your Ring camera. So in essence it’ll connect in from there, okay, so you can actually see now I’ll put the back bracket up at… the back thing… onto there, now and I’ll actually just screw the back in there, so again this is going to wall mount instead, so screw that back in. That’s attached… using a drill is not really the best way of doing it… it’s easier just to use a screwdriver, but there we are, I was lazy because it was really warm! Okay so that point, that’s attached, it’s nice and secure, so I’ll put the power cable back in and just leave that.

Next thing up… next thing I want to do… is actually attach the wall bracket after measuring up. So I’ll drill a couple of holes for this. [Drilling noise] I’m going to – I’m actually using the Ring… I’m gonna use the actual anchor provided by Ring, although the wall anchors aren’t that good I thought it’s good enough. [Drilling noise] [Drilling noise] With those holes done, I’ll zoom in on them now, but before I do that I’ll just put these wall anchors in. I’ll just hammer them in… yeah brilliant hammering work, 10 out of 10 there! And the other one as well! Okay brilliant, so I’ve zoomed in now – you can actually see with the pencil, you can see where the wall anchors are. It’s not particularly straight to be honest… level… but it’ll do the job, to be honest, because you can actually move around the Ring camera at the end, which we’ll look at, so it doesn’t have to be completely level (the actual screw holes), thankfully. Uhm okay, so I’m just starting to put that in place and then I’m just gonna I’ve put some screws in and I’m just gonna tighten the screws now, on the bracket.

Okay and that’s pretty much there now. That’s the back bracket of the Ring cam. To be honest it doesn’t need to be that secure because obviously if anyone was to nick this, I would get a lot of footage of them actually stealing it, and the Ring indoor cam is quite cheap anyway. But either way, it’s attached to the wall and it’s very solid, it’s not going to fall down and the Ring cam just clicks on top which you can see there, so it clicks in and clicks down to secure it. And then as you can see here, you can actually move the indoor cam around. You can rotate it up, you can rotate it sideways, you can get a really good field of vision, and it’s really flexible in terms of exactly what you’re able to see. Okay, in terms of the wire, you can just see it going along there. Obviously I’ll probably tack it to the wall or put in trunking – like you can see there – but right now, I’ll just leave it there. You can see the blue light meaning it’s in recording mode.

Finally I just want to test things out and verify that everything works, so I’m going to Ring – jump into the Ring app here – I’ll go into the garage and just tap to go live… it takes a few seconds uhm… but there we are, it’s live. There we are, you can see me now recording whilst also watching the feed on my camera – which is confusing! Hello, hi! Okay so you can see the – sort of – video feed here you can see the good quality, and I’m just adjusting it um up and down to my liking, so you can see there’s a very good – sort of – recording quality here. Obviously there’s a lot of light coming from the garage – um the garage door that’s open – but, you know, it’s good quality of recording, and you you can make out the person in the garage. I’ll turn the light off, um, which makes it a bit harder to see me, but let’s test out night vision mode now.

So I’ll shut the garage door, and quite quickly the infrared sensors detect this low light, and at this point I realized that I’m stuck because I can’t see in the dark! So I’m trying not to trip over and look like an idiot! Uhm, there we are I’m finding my way… yeah, I’m not dead or falling over, that’s brilliant. Okay cool, yeah, there we are: hello! Yeah brilliant, well done you found your way to the camera! On this note, if I seen this clip on my Ring camera I would instantly ring the police but thankfully I know that this is me and no one else! You can see anyway the night vision is really good, you can see the quality there. It’s in black and white but you can see me really well, and hence I could see an intruder. Obviously open the garage door and light then floods in, you can see the light flood in, and it’s a bit harder to see me…. it was very hard to see me, but to be honest most thefts would take place at night with night vision, so I have no problems about the actual quality of the recording here. Uhm and even then I can see me here, um and combined with my Ring… indoor… my Ring doorbell, I’m not too concerned about the quality of the footage here, so overall yeah I’m really happy with the result!

Quick final point is in the box you get a Ring warning sticker, as you can see. Now I could stick it to my garage somewhere visible from the street, such as there, um or I could throw it away completely because some people say not to advertise your security system, or I could put it down here right by the lock, so if the burglar comes and tries to tamper with the lock they’ll see this. My own opinion on this sticker debate is that Ring cameras are quite obvious – as are Nest cameras – so you may as well… you know… put up a sticker because it’s quite obvious to a thief anyway that you’ve got a Ring camera. Uhm okay, so this is my garage. I’ve got some CCTV already, but I’ve also now got this Ring protection as well, as you can see from this, which should hopefully act as a deterrent for any would be thieves.

Hey YouTube, thanks for watching this video, I hope you enjoyed it! I wanted to walk you through the whole steps of how I set up my Ring indoor cam considering I didn’t have internet in my garage already, which was always going to be a challenge because I had to decide how to get internet there. In the end, obviously as you’ve seen, I decided on using powerline adapters with a router to create a wireless access point. Uhm, I was a little bit unsure about where the powerline adapters would work for me but to be honest it worked really well. So far it’s already been a week I’ve had this setup for, and I’ve had no issues at all. I’ve been able to go into my Ring app and look at the footage of my Ring camera with no… in the garage… with no issue whatsoever. It’s always worked really well. I’ll still keep an eye on it, but so far I’m really happy with the solution and I’m happy with the camera in my garage as well. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please click the thumbs up button and don’t forget to subscribe. Thank you!