What Changes the Cost of a CCTV Camera System

CCTV camera cost is cable, not camera count

A camera on an outside wall with the recorder directly behind it on the inside is a hole and twenty minutes. The same camera on the far corner of the house, with a loft that has no boarding and a cavity that will not take a rod, can be most of a morning. Nothing about the camera changed.

This is why a price over the phone is a guess. When we quote a job in Lowestoft or Great Yarmouth the number comes from walking the actual cable runs, and it is the difference between a straightforward install and an awkward one that moves the figure, not the make on the box.

Retention is a decision, not a default

Every recorder overwrites its oldest footage once the drive is full, so retention is simply how long it takes to fill. Four cameras recording continuously fill a drive roughly twice as fast as two, and raising resolution does the same thing again.

The question worth asking is how long it realistically takes you to notice something. For a house that is often a few days, because you would see a broken window. For a business with a weekend shutdown or a storage yard checked monthly, it can be considerably longer, and specifying 14 days when you needed 6 weeks is a cheap mistake to avoid at the quoting stage and an expensive one to fix afterwards.

Recording on motion rather than continuously stretches retention a long way, but only if the motion settings are sane. A camera triggered by a tree records more than one recording continuously.

The things that add less than people expect

Resolution is cheaper than it was, and the step from a basic camera to a good one is usually a small part of a job's total next to the labour. The same goes for night performance: a camera that sees in colour after dark costs more than one that switches to infrared, but not enough to be the reason a quote is high.

Where money does get wasted is on cameras nobody needed, put up because the kit came in a box of eight. Four cameras in the right places beat eight in convenient ones, and it is a cheaper job as well as a better one.

What a boxed kit really costs

A kit off a shelf looks like the whole system for the price of two of ours, and for some buildings it genuinely is enough. It is worth being clear about what is not in the box.

The honest position is that a kit fitted well in an easy building is fine, and we would not pretend otherwise. What we see is kits fitted where the building fought back: cameras up high because that is where the cable reached, which brings you back to the first problem on this site, that a camera in the wrong position does not identify anybody at any resolution.

What a quote from us looks like

It is also why two quotes for the same house can be far apart without either being unreasonable. One may have priced a route the other never walked. The same is true of a burglar alarm installation, where the cost sits in the doors and windows covered rather than in the panel on the wall.

We come and look, and the price that follows says what goes where, what it costs and what it does not include. It is one figure rather than a range that moves later, and nothing is ordered before you have seen it.

If a smaller system would do what you actually want, we will say so on the visit rather than quote for the bigger one. That is usually the conversation that saves the most, and it is a lot easier to have standing in the building than over the phone.