In 2015/16 we had our house extended and remodelled, and I used one of those Brinno cameras - a TLC200 - to document it. I have no hesitation whatsoever in recommending them.
However... As with any type of photography, having the right kit is one thing, but knowing how to use it properly is another - something I discovered as the job progressed!
I made 12 short videos of the project, with a total running time of about 11 minutes. They're all available on YouTube, if you're interested, here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLu0uHML0pwBdJzKmTGHA9yoQftxwjMLus
(For a quick taster, the most interesting ones are probably parts 3, 5, 7 and 12.)
That might be a good idea for the demolition phase, but probably not for the construction phase. The issue (as I found) is that the shell of the house can be built very quickly, and then all the interesting things happen inside where your camera can't see them. And even with the demolition phase, if the builders start at the end of the house furthest from the camera, you won't get much interesting footage.
It depends on what you're trying to achieve, but if you want anything more / better than just a timelapse of the house being demolished and the shell of the house being put up, then realistically you do need to be there regularly. Not so much to change batteries and cards, but to position the camera appropriately to capture the different phases of the work.
If you want to run the camera off mains electricity, you need to work out where are you going to get your supply from, and how you are going to get a cable to the camera such that it won't be disturbed during the project. This is non trivial.
With regard to getting the images off the camera, I don't think it's a coincidence that the Brinno cameras all use SD cards rather than some form of wired or wireless means. One consideration is that file sizes are very large, and transmitting individual frames can be prohibitive. What the Brinno cameras do is process each frame automatically into a video, and then save it to the card as an AVI. I think that makes a lot of sense.
Brinno cameras can be configured to switch on and off automatically at the same time each day. For example, for my project I recorded from 08:00 to 18:00 each day. The camera then packaged up each day's activity into a separate AVI file.
How many frames per hour? It depends totally on the rate of progress on the job, how you want it to look when it's finished, and what you want the run time to be.
There are useful calculators on the Brinno website to calculate file sizes at different frame rates, and there is also very good data about battery life in various circumstances.
I found that my final timelapse speed (in the finished videos) typically runs at between 15 minutes and 1 hour of actual time for every second of video. That's one frame of video for every 30 seconds to 2 minutes of real time, approximately. However I captured the data at a higher frame rate - typically 1 frame per 10 seconds, I think - to give me scope to tinker with it at the editing stage. Remember, if you have more frames than you need, then you can always throw some away, but if you don't have enough, you're stuffed.
Hope this has given you food for thought. Very happy to discuss.
