I am going on holiday in a few weeks and leaving my dogs, which I have done before, one child still lives at home but works full time so I get a dog walker in. Never normally worry as they have always been fine but this is the first time leaving my 17mth old and I just feel more worried about it. The other 3 dogs are 13, 10 and 4 so I don't worry as much as they are a bit older and been left before and my son is very capable of feeding them etc and my daughter will pop in. Only going for week!
I was thinking of getting a web cam thingy so I can watch or check on them from a far using my phone or ipad, has anyone done this or have suggestions of good makes to buy??

Personally I wouldn't bother :) If you are confident leaving them as arranged, I'd enjoy your holiday rather than spend time keep checking up on them :) :)

Depends how you want to do it.  A decent webcam will work with Skype, and you can set it to answer automatically and you can mute it from your end so the dog's don't know anything's happened (this is how I watch mine for separation training), but it requires your PC to be on all the time.

The other usual option is an IP camera.  Better quality usually, better field of vision (bear in mind that webcams are designed just to film your head and shoulders, so you don't get a lot of the room in shot for monitoring purposes), a lot are remote controllable so you can look round the room via your phone/tablet/netbook/laptop and some also have audio going both ways if you want it.  But, they are harder to set up and need IP compatible software/websites to work (no-ip.biz is one).  Personally I never got to grips with mine, hence my webcam setup but the view is restrictive - I'm currently looking at wide-angle webcams.

All that said though, I am with Daisy and I would concentrate on your holiday!

don't think I mean webcam then, i have seen in the apple store like a baby monitor/camera that you set up in the room and can watch on computer remotely from iPhone or iPad.

I know i should enjoy holiday but i thought it might stop me worrying if i could check in the day on occasions. I know if i could see them being naughty or barking there isn't anything i could do!

Hi

I use 2 IP cameras in the house, to monitor my dog (and my teen!) when I am out. I can access the cameras from my phone, ipad or any PC. I can remotely move the cameras to pan around the rooms and they have night vision too.

I think they're great!  I paid about £50 each for mine. They're Sonic IP by Storage Options (from Amazon). They did take a bit of fiddling around with the router settings to get the remote access to work, but I did it eventually - mostly by Googling for info and tips on how to do it. I do have a dynamic hosting address thingy which I pay for annually (only a tenner or so) which I found I needed for the remote access. If you are more savvy at configuring, you might not necessarily need this.

In theory I can listen and talk over mine, but in practice the sound quality is awful and it scares the dog - so I abandoned that after one attempt!

I wouldn't be without them. I know from watching, that my dog always sleeps when I go out and I've never witnessed him barking or looking unhappy. Very reassuring when the need arises.