CCTV Repairs and Upgrades in Ipswich

The faults we see most

Most camera systems that stop working have one of a handful of problems.

The hard drive fails. Surveillance drives write all day, every day, and after four or five years they wear out. Signs are a recorder that beeps, recordings that stop at a certain date, or playback that skips. A new drive fixes it, though the old footage usually goes with the old drive.

The app stops connecting. This is the most common call, and nearly always it follows a new modem, a change of internet provider or a phone upgrade. The cameras are still recording. The path from the recorder to your phone is what broke, and it is fixed at the router and in the app.

Cameras drop out. One camera offline is often a cable termination that has let water in, a failed port on a cheap network switch, or a power supply on its way out. Several offline at once usually points to the recorder’s PoE supply.

The night picture is bad. Spider webs in front of the infrared lights, a camera that has slowly rotated on its mount, or infrared lights that have simply failed. Cleaning and re-aiming fixes the first two.

How a repair works

We start with a diagnosis, not a parts order. Tell us what is happening, the brand if you know it, and how old the system is. On site, each camera, cable and the recorder is tested, and you get a plain answer: what is wrong, what fixing it costs, and whether that is good money compared with replacing the part of the system that failed.

Upgrading old analogue systems

Plenty of Ipswich homes and shops still run analogue cameras from ten or more years ago, on coaxial cable with a DVR. They worked at the time, but the picture is 720p or worse and faces are a smudge.

There are two ways to upgrade. The cheaper one keeps your existing coax and swaps the cameras and DVR for HD-over-coax equipment, which gives a much sharper picture without new cable. The better one replaces the coax with Cat6 and moves to network cameras, which gives you 4K, better night vision, smart detection and the option of active deterrence. We price both so you can see the difference.

Mixing brands

If you want to keep some existing network cameras and add new ones, many recorders can take cameras from other brands using a standard called ONVIF. It works for live view and recording, though some smart features only work when the camera and recorder are the same brand. We test compatibility before promising it.

Questions people ask

Will you work on a system someone else installed?

Yes. Plenty of repair calls are for systems someone else put in. If the brand uses its own closed cloud app, there may be limits to what can be changed, and we will say so up front.

Is it worth repairing an old system?

Sometimes. A failed hard drive or power supply in a system that is a few years old is usually worth fixing. A ten year old 720p analogue system with several dead cameras is usually better upgraded.

Can you recover footage from a dead recorder?

Often, if the hard drive itself is healthy. The drive can be read in another recorder or a computer with the right software. If the drive has failed, recovery is less likely.