Security Camera Wiring in a Finished Los Angeles Home: Routes, Cable and Cost

The house decides the route

Every wired system has the same shape: a cable from each camera runs back to one location, where a PoE switch or recorder powers the cameras and stores the video. What changes is the path those cables can take without being seen, and Los Angeles houses fall into a handful of patterns.

House type	Usual route	The hard part
One story, raised foundation (pre-war and many 1940s–50s homes)	Attic for eave cameras; crawlspace for anything mounted low, a doorbell camera or a run to the far side of the house.	Usually the easiest house to wire. Crawlspace clearance and old debris set the pace, not the cable.
One story, slab (most postwar tract homes in the Valley and South Bay)	Everything through the attic, down to cameras under the eaves.	Nothing can come up from below. A camera wanted at door height means fishing down inside a wall cavity from the attic.
Two story	Upper-floor and eave cameras from the attic; the garage ceiling for the driveway side.	First-floor cameras. The second floor’s framing sits between them and the attic, so the choices are the garage, a closet chase, or a painted raceway on the outside.
Hillside and split-level	Several separate attic sections, stepping between levels.	Getting from one section to the next, and reaching decks and lower-level entries.
Condo or townhome	Garage ceiling and interior routes.	The exterior wall is often common area. Read the CC&Rs and get association approval before a single hole is drilled outside.

The shortest route is not always the best one: an extra ten feet through the garage often beats a shorter path that means cutting into a finished hallway. Cable stays off the underside of the roof deck and away from furnace flues.

Why most cameras end up under the eave

If you look at a professionally wired house in Los Angeles, most of the cameras sit on the soffit, just under the roofline. That is not an accident. A camera there has its cable dropping straight down from the attic into the camera base, so there is no hole through the exterior wall at all — the cable never sees weather. It is also out of easy reach (the placement checklist covers heights and angles).

The eave has limits. On a two-story house the upper eave is too high for a usable face at the front door, and some homes have no overhang at all. Those are the cameras that go on the wall, and the wall is where workmanship shows.

Going through stucco without starting a leak

Most Los Angeles homes are stucco over building paper. The paper behind the stucco is what actually keeps water out of the framing, and every hole drilled for a cable punctures it. That is the real risk of a wall-mounted camera — not the camera, the hole.

What a sound penetration looks like:

• The hole is hidden behind the camera — inside a junction box or mounting base sized for that camera model — so the cable goes straight from the wall into the housing and nothing is left exposed.
• The hole is sealed with an exterior-grade sealant around the cable, and the base is sealed to the wall on the top and sides.
• Water has nowhere to follow the cable in. The bore is drilled so it does not slope toward the house, and any exposed cable forms a drip loop so water drops off before it reaches the hole.
• It stays clear of the weep screed at the base of the wall and of window and door flashing, where the building paper is designed to drain.

Ask how exterior holes are sealed before work starts. A cable pushed through a bare hole tends to show up later as a stain on the inside wall.

Which cable goes where

The cable is the part you will never see again, so it is worth specifying. A camera run is solid-copper Cat6 carrying Power over Ethernet, limited to 100 metres (328 feet) per run — comfortably more than any house needs. Avoid copper-clad aluminium cable sold as “Cat6”; our camera fault guide explains why it causes cameras to drop out.

Where the cable runs	What it should be
Attic, crawlspace and inside walls	Solid-copper Cat6 with a communications fire-rating on the jacket (CM or CMR). CMX is a lower rating allowed only for limited use in dwellings; a fire rating also says nothing about sunlight.
Exposed on an outside wall	An outdoor-rated, sunlight-resistant jacket, run in a paintable raceway or conduit. Indoor cable left in the sun turns brittle.
Underground to another building or a gate	Cable rated for wet locations, inside conduit. The electrical code treats the inside of any buried raceway as a wet location (NEC 300.5(B)), and in practice buried conduit holds water.
Next to household wiring	Never in the same box or raceway as the 120-volt circuits. Low-voltage cable crosses power wiring; it does not share its space.

Leave a short service loop at each camera and at the rack, and label both ends of every run. The next person to touch the system — including you, in five years — will know which cable is the side gate.

Inside: fire blocks, old paint and the recorder

Fire blocks. Where a cable passes from a wall cavity into the attic, it goes through the top plate — which is part of the house’s fire blocking. The California Residential Code requires openings around cables and wires at ceiling and floor level to be sealed with an approved material that resists the free passage of flame and combustion products (CRC R302.11), and it applies the same requirement to penetrations of the wall between an attached garage and the house (R302.5.3). Every hole through a plate, and every hole from the garage into the house, gets fire-rated sealant. Ask for it by name.

Older houses. Much of Los Angeles was built before 1978, when lead paint was still used. Under EPA’s renovation rule, a job that disturbs six square feet or less of interior painted surface, or 20 square feet or less of exterior, is not treated as a “renovation” — a handful of cable holes normally sits well under that. Opening a section of wall to get past blocking is a different job, so if drywall has to come open in an older house, ask how the dust will be contained.

Where the recorder lives. Pick a closet near your internet router with some airflow, not a sealed cabinet and not a hot garage attic. Put the recorder, the PoE switch and the router on a small UPS: short outages are common, and the cameras only keep recording as long as the switch feeding them has power. When a room has to be opened, it is usually here, to bring the cables down from the attic into the closet.

Detached garages, gates and ADUs

A camera on a detached garage, a back-lot ADU or a driveway gate is where wiring turns into digging. The durable answer is conduit in a trench with wet-location-rated cable inside, and a pull string left in for whatever comes next — a gate intercom, an access reader, a Wi-Fi access point in the ADU.

Before any trench, the utilities get marked. California’s one-call law sets notice to 811 at least two working days, and no more than 14 calendar days, before excavation starts (Government Code § 4216.2). Gas and sewer laterals share the same yard as your cable route, which is reason enough on its own.

Where trenching is impractical — across a finished hardscape, say — a point-to-point wireless bridge between the two buildings is a legitimate alternative, with each end still wired to its cameras. That is a different thing from putting a Wi-Fi camera on the garage, and our wired versus wireless guide explains why the difference matters.

What a well-run install day looks like

For a typical 4–8 camera house, whoever you hire, the order of work should run roughly like this:

1. Walk and mark. Every camera position is agreed with you on site and checked for what it will actually see before any hole is drilled.
2. Pull cable. Attic and crawlspace runs go in first, from each camera position back to the recorder location.
3. Penetrations and mounts. Exterior holes are drilled, bases mounted and sealed; interior plates are fire-sealed.
4. Terminate and power up. Each run is terminated and brought up on the switch, one camera at a time, so a bad run shows up immediately.
5. Aim, record and hand over. Final angles in daylight, recording and retention set, the phone app on your devices, and a walkthrough of how to find and export a clip.

What it costs in Los Angeles

Camera projects in Los Angeles run from $1,500 to $30,000 and up. The wiring route is one of the biggest things that moves a house within that range: a single-story home over a crawlspace is the least labour per camera, a two-story slab house with first-floor cameras is more, and a trench to a gate or ADU is its own line. Patching and painting, when a wall does have to be opened, should be stated in the proposal rather than left for later.

We do not quote a flat price sight-unseen, because we cannot see your attic from here. The assessment is free, and the proposal is written, line-item and carries model numbers for every camera, the recorder and the cable — see our camera installation cost guide for what else moves the number. Pay-over-time is available through our partner PayPal.

Why Innov8av

Cameras, the low-voltage wiring behind them and the network they sit on are one scope here, done by our own technicians rather than subcontracted crews.

Questions worth putting to every bidder: the route for each camera, in writing; the cable by jacket rating and conductor (solid copper, not CCA); how exterior holes are sealed; whether plate and garage-wall penetrations get fire-rated sealant; where the recorder goes and whether it is on a UPS; and who patches and paints if a wall is opened.

Keep reading

Code references on this page are general information, not a substitute for the requirements of your building department, your HOA or your insurer.