For a lot of people a huge barrier to entry in setting up a home surveillance system is the permanency of the whole thing, especially for renters.

The running of cables through dusty roof cavities, drilling 20mm holes in your eaves and making sure all the cables are long enough is a huge turn off if you are not the owner.

Enter the Swann Max Ranger 4K mini ($499.95; Amazon Australia).

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A wireless solution that takes no time to install and doesn’t require any special tools or equipment.

I was able to set up the two cameras that came in the kit with a screwdriver and a ladder, no drilling required!

The setup

The Max Ranger kit came with a base station, two cameras and an SD card for local storage.

In the box was some very handy step by step guides on getting everything connected and synced up.

Once all connected it was just a matter of installing them onto the eaves with three screws per camera.

I found the app refreshingly easy to use and navigate and I managed to get from unboxing to fully setup in under an hour (including mandatory cup of coffee break).

The key features

Range

Swann claims the wireless system can reach 300m with direct line of sight and 100m through obstacles.

At first I was very sceptical of this claim. But then I took one of the cameras for a walk!

With the base station inside behind a brick wall, I was able to get to about the 110m mark down the hill of my street before the camera lost connection.

I wasn’t able to test the 300m claim but suffice it to say the Wi-Fi HaLow system does what it says on the box.

In addition to this I was pleased to see that once I walked back into range of the base station the camera reconnected straight away.

Battery life

I fully charged both cameras before installing them with the out of the box sensitivity settings.

One camera was mounted in a high traffic area and was triggered probably two to three times more often than the other camera.

After seven weeks this camera’s battery was fully depleted.

To charge the cameras they can unscrew from their mounting brackets and be plugged with a USB C cable into the back of the hub.

I was able to fully charge the camera overnight from 0 per cent to 100 per cent.

At the time of writing this review, the camera in the lower traffic area is sitting at 39 per cent after two months!

If periodic charging isn’t your thing, Swann does sell a compatible solar panel that can be installed to charge the battery during the day.

Local storage

At the end of the day, a security system is all about security and when brands require you to store your footage on a cloud there are genuine concerns about how secure this can be.

With the Swann Max Ranger 4K all video that is captured is stored locally on the SD card.

And if space ever becomes a concern the storage can be expanded by adding an external hard drive onto the base station.

The key takeaway here is your videos aren’t stored anywhere else, no cloud backups, just LOCAL storage.

A huge green tick from me for privacy and security.

For more information and to shop the Swann camera, head here now.