Almost every business owner we meet has a CCTV story. The cameras that showed a grey blur after dark. The outdoor camera that stopped working after the first heavy rain. The recorder that turned out to hold only two days of footage when the incident happened last week. In nearly every case the installation was fine. The specification was wrong.
Before looking at any product, walk your premises and write down what each camera is for. Do you need to recognise a face at the gate, or just know that someone came in? Do you need to read a number plate, watch a till, or cover a wide car park? Each of those needs a different camera in a different position.
A wide-angle camera covering a whole shop floor will show you that something happened. It will rarely show you who did it. A camera positioned at head height near a doorway, covering a narrow area, will give you a face. Most useful systems mix the two.
Nearly every camera sold today claims night vision. What matters is how far the infrared reaches and how the camera handles mixed light. A camera mounted high on a wall with infrared rated for a short range will illuminate the ground beneath it and nothing beyond.
Look at the site after dark before deciding. Security lights, streetlights and a neighbour's floodlight all change what a camera will see. Bright light behind a person turns them into a silhouette. Sometimes the best improvement is a modest light near the entrance rather than a more expensive camera.
Also check what happens at dusk. Some cameras switch to night mode late and give you a dark, noisy picture during the hour when many incidents happen.
An indoor dome camera under a small awning is not an outdoor camera. Rain, humidity, dust and heat will get into it. For anything exposed, look for a weather rating stated by the manufacturer, and treat cameras without one as indoor only.
Cabling fails outdoors more often than cameras do. Connectors left exposed corrode, cable left loose gets chewed or pulled, and unprotected runs pick up interference. Insist on conduit or trunking for outdoor runs and sealed junction boxes at every connection.
Cameras are only as useful as the footage you can retrieve. Decide how many days you need to keep and make sure the recorder is sized for it. More cameras, higher resolution and continuous recording all use storage faster. Motion-based recording saves space but can miss slow or distant movement, so use it with care.
Put the recorder somewhere secure and out of sight. A recorder sitting next to the till can be taken along with the cash. Put it on a UPS as well, because a recorder that reboots every time the power flickers will corrupt files and lose footage.
Viewing your cameras from a phone is now a standard requirement, and it works well when the connection at the premises is stable. If the site relies on a mobile data router, understand that upload speed limits how many cameras you can watch live and at what quality. It is often better to check a single camera or review recorded events than to stream everything at once.
Set up individual accounts for each person who needs access and remove them when staff leave. Change the default passwords on the recorder and cameras on the day they are installed.
Ask what each camera is intended to capture and at what distance. Ask for the weather rating of any outdoor unit. Ask how many days of footage the recorder will hold at the resolution proposed. Ask how the cabling will be protected. Ask what happens when the power goes off. If the answers are vague, the specification is probably vague too.
We survey premises in daylight and after dark before we recommend anything, because the difference between a system that disappoints and one that works is usually decided before a single camera is mounted.
We are happy to look at how this applies to your business, with no obligation.
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