Most people sign off on a camera installation by looking at a phone screen showing four live camera views in daylight, deciding it looks good, and paying. Then three months later something happens and they discover the night footage is unusable, or the recording only kept four days, or nobody knows the password. This checklist takes about twenty minutes and is worth doing while the installer is still standing there. Check the night view, not just the day view Daytime footage almost always looks fine. Night is where systems disappoint. If the install finishes in the afternoon, ask to see recorded night footage from a test the installer has run, or arrange to check that evening and raise anything then. Look at each camera specifically for: Whether a person at the distance you care about is actually identifiable
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A camera that would last eight years a few suburbs inland can be failing within two near the water. Nothing was faulty. It was simply never built for these conditions. If you are anywhere near the coast, this is worth understanding before you buy anything, because the difference in cost between suitable and unsuitable equipment is small compared to replacing it twice. What salt air actually does Salt is carried inland on the wind as a fine airborne mist, well beyond the beach itself. It settles on everything, absorbs moisture from the air, and stays damp far longer than rain would. That permanent damp salt layer corrodes metal. It attacks fixings, brackets, screw threads and any exposed connection. It works its way into seams and around seals, and once corrosion starts around a seal the housing is no
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Megapixels are easy to sell. Eight sounds better than four, and four sounds better than two. But resolution is only one part of image quality, and in real security footage it is often not the part that determines whether you can actually identify what happened. A sharp daytime image on a product demonstration tells you very little about how useful that camera will be at eleven o'clock at night when somebody is moving through a poorly lit driveway. What megapixels actually tell you Megapixels describe how many pixels make up the image. More pixels can capture more detail. That matters when you need to zoom into a face, clothing, a vehicle or another identifying feature after an event. So resolution is not meaningless. All else being equal, a higher-resolution camera can produce a more detailed image. The problem
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This comes up on nearly every job, usually as an afterthought once the cameras are already being positioned. It is much better dealt with first. The following is general information, not legal advice. If you have a specific dispute or an unusual situation, get proper advice. Home CCTV is legal Installing security cameras on your own residential property in New South Wales is lawful. You do not need council approval in ordinary circumstances, and you do not need your neighbour's permission to have cameras. Cameras used for genuine personal or household security also sit outside most of the obligations that apply to businesses under privacy legislation. That is the simple part. The nuance is in what the cameras capture and how you use the footage. A properly planned home security camera installation should take camera angles, neighbouring
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Most people do not think about how long their camera footage is stored until they need to find something that happened two or three weeks ago. That is usually the worst time to discover the system only keeps seven days. There is no single answer to how long CCTV footage is stored. Retention depends on how the system was configured, how many cameras are recording, the resolution they record at, how often they record, and how much storage is available. What happens when the storage fills up Most CCTV systems do not simply stop recording when the hard drive is full. They overwrite the oldest footage automatically. Today replaces the oldest day on the recorder, then tomorrow replaces the next one, and so on. That means your retention period is effectively a moving window. If the system holds
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This is the first question most people ask, and it usually gets answered badly, because whoever is answering has a preference rather than a reason. Both work. They fail in different ways, and which failure you can live with is the actual decision. What wireless actually means Worth clearing up first: most wireless cameras still need power. A wireless camera sends its video over your WiFi but is usually plugged into a power point. So you have avoided the data cable but you still need power at the mounting position, which is often the harder cable to get there anyway. Truly wire-free cameras run on batteries, which is a separate category with its own trade-offs. The case for wired A wired camera, typically running Power over Ethernet, uses one cable that carries both power and video. It is
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Driveway or street approach. Vehicles, deliveries and anyone approaching before they reach the house. Side access. Almost every home has one path down the side that people forget about. It is usually narrow, usually gated, and usually the least visible part of the property. Rear or yard. Back door, back gate, anything opening onto a lane or shared rear access. Corner blocks, homes with two street frontages, and larger properties need more, because there are simply more ways in. Apartments and townhouses often need fewer. Where people waste cameras The most common mistake is covering the same view twice. Two cameras pointed at the driveway from slightly different angles produce two versions of the same footage and leave the side gate unwatched. The second most common is buying a bundled kit of eight cameras because it looked like
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