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You'll have a hard time finding a member of the political or celebrity elite who doesn't have his own team of specialists monitoring his gates and home video surveillance system at all hours (not to mention his bodyguard, who ensures that any trip past the perimeter of his private estate is as safe as humanly possible).

The sad truth for the rest of us is that people are expensive commodities and, since Abe Lincoln had his way with the constitution, not something you can purchase once off. Machines, on the other hand, well, you can rely on your dishwasher to keep washing those dishes until one of the parts gives or the power cuts out. Built-in obsolescence aside, technology will work for you forever. Now, a well-designed, fully-integrated home security surveillance system certainly won't be able to protect you from intruders - but a wailing alarm siren coupled with the fear of being identified on camera will do a lot to scare would-be burglars away.

Of course, in order to record high-quality footage for days or weeks at a time, you'd need an extremely powerful computer system capable of storing terabyte upon terabyte of information. Many people do just this, purchasing expensive Hybrid Digital Video Recorders (HDVRs) that record multiple camera feeds at once. Other people subscribe to online storage clusters, to which data is wireless transmitted as it's recorded, ensuring that there's no possibility of intruders tampering with recorded home security surveillance footage. Both these solutions use a system of looped recording that copies over footage a few days or a week after it's recorded, ensuring your data pool doesn't become unreasonably large.

There is, however, a much more nifty solution to the problem of storing digital footage. It involves the judicious use of PIR motion detectors which, with a little uncomplicated rewiring, can be used to activate your home security surveillance system. PIR motion detectors cover a cone-shaped area, and are activated by a change of sufficient degree in the heat of that area. Thus, they utilize very little power and take up no storage space in terms of information. When activated, they'll cause your cameras to come into operation, setting them to run for a certain specified period beyond the last detected movement or change in the observed area.

This means that your home video surveillance system will only record when it needs to, eliminating the requirement for oodles of storage space. You can make such a home video surveillance system even more efficacious by the inclusion of PTZ (panning, tilting and zooming) cameras that utilize motion tracking programs to follow intruders as they go about their evil deeds.

Home security surveillance systems can be constructed with the cheapest of materials or utilizing the most sophisticated technology (indeed, PIR motion detectors can be had for as little as $20). The best move when deciding which route you'd like to go is to do lots of research, determining how the ever-fluctuating market looks relative to your pocket, and determining whether you'll be able to do the installation as a DIY project. If it all looks too overwhelming and complex to you, you'd probably be best served by signing up with a good security company that will do the home video surveillance system installation and monitoring for you - and back it up with force when the need arises.