faulty cctv

Are your retail CCTV systems being checked?

CCTV is an integral part of retail loss prevention, security, and health and safety, and modern CCTV systems are powerful devices which store many days, weeks, or months of unattended footage.

Fit and forget?

Digital CCTV systems are often seen as a ‘fit and forget’ solution, and in an ideal world they would be, but the fact that they operate with very little human intervention can also mean that it could be many days, weeks, or months before any problems are noticed, and often only after an incident has occurred.

There are plenty of things that can reduce the operational performance of a CCTV system at any time – such as cameras becoming faulty or being tampered with, the hard disk storage failing, alarm connections coming loose, and even the clock loosing accuracy.

Supplement your maintenance contract

Even in this digital era, when many CCTV systems are connected to networks, maintenance contracts are still based on one or two site visits a year from the installer to ensure that the systems are working effectively, but this can leave a large part of the year when your stores are vulnerable if there is a failure.

Manual checking can be a time consuming and mundane task, especially across multiple sites. This is where CheckMyCCTV can help by running multiple operation checks on all your CCTV systems every hour of every day, alerting you when any of issues are detected so they can be resolved quickly with reduced downtime and maintenance costs.

CheckMyCCTV is used to monitor thousands of retail stores to reduce the risk of faulty CCTV systems, contact us at sales@nullcheckmysystems.com for a FREE 14-day trial or to discuss how CheckMyCCTV can help you.

 

Is your CCTV faulty?

Are your CCTV systems working right now? It’s a pretty simple question but in reality a difficult one to answer. There’s often no quick way of knowing if remote CCTV systems are operating as expected, which is where CheckMyCCTV can help.

In many cases faults are often only discovered when an incident occurs that has not been recorded, and by then it is too late.

We wanted to discover how many sites had typical faults or issues which were undetected. So with the help of our customers, we gathered statistics from a sample of 300 sites and included only the initial test result to represent of the state of the CCTV system prior to using CheckMyCCTV.

The results were surprising, 75% of all units tested had at least one issue which affected operational performance requirements as highlighted in the UK POLICE REQUIREMENTS FOR DIGITAL CCTV SYSTEMS document.

45% of units were recording for less than 31 days.
31% of units had the time set more than 1 hour fast/slow.
24% of units had the incorrect Timezone/Daylight Savings time configured.
16% of units had one or more failed cameras.
6% of units had problems with Alarms not activating.
2% of units were not recording at all.

Fortunately, CheckMyCCTV identified these issues and they were rectified by the installer. However, without using CheckMyCCTV it may have been several months before the issues were noticed, leaving a critical security gap in the users CCTV coverage.

It seems that there are plenty of documented cases where CCTV systems have been installed and are assumed to be working, but were not. I quickly found a number of examples by entering ‘faulty CCTV’ into Google search:

CCTV cameras weren’t working during Digbeth club shooting

Blackburn town centre CCTV cameras ‘faulty’

Quarter of council’s CCTV cameras not working

There were many more listed in the search results, and along with the Van Gogh painting which was stolen from Cairo Museum which I wrote about in a previous blog, it seems that faulty or incorrectly configured CCTV systems may not be as uncommon as first thought.

Want to find out if your CCTV systems are operating correcting? CheckMyCCTV automatically performs a number of checks on all your CCTV installations every day to ensure you systems are operating as expected. Contact us today at sales@nullcheckmysystems.com to trial CheckMyCCTV FREE for 14-days.