Costing a new CCTV System

[Bobbeh]

Hi, we have a fairly low resolution CCTV system based on Concept Pro Cameras and DVRs that we would like to move away from. The intention would be to move away gradually to an IP camera based system doing as much of the work ourselves as possible. We currently have 30 cameras (around half external) and ideally would like to add a couple more to add greater coverage (although better quality cameras with wider lenses may solve some of those issues!).

 

Having looked through past threads Hikvision and Ubiquiti seems to be very popular. I'm interested to get an idea of costs so that I can take some figures to SLT and Governors of an overall estimate for the whole project and an estimate for the initial phase for getting the first few cameras up and running.

 

One of the things I'm most unsure about is the best way to store the footage, for the number of cameras we are likely to have are DVRs, NAS or a Server better for the longer term (Bearing in mind scalability/ease of adding new devices, access to the footage by myself and SLT, updateability/'futureproofing' and so on)? I think that I should be able to bring pretty much all the network cables back to one location - our server room.

 

Any hints from your own experiences would be greatly appreciated.

 

Cameras, cabling, somewhere to store the footage, PoE switch or power injectors, time...am I forgetting anything? Software?

 

Thanks.

[Net-Ctrl]

Hello, if it is of interest we can look at putting together a total cost for your project and review all the workings etc to give you something to present to SLT and Governors.

 

We don't supply Hik or Ubiq cameras but specialise in a German manufacturer called Mobotix. They're a pure IP high res camera manufacturer and a solution that we have installed and supported into schools and colleges throughout the UK. Camera vs camera Mobotix is more expensive than those you mentioned but we typically require a lot less cameras to cover areas.

 

If you think that we could be of assistance, please let me know and I can arrange for one of the project guys to get in touch. As well as the camera we can also handle all the areas you mentioned above.

[snagrat]

Hikvision do a calculator to calculate he storage required for the cameras you plan to install.

Maybe worth playing with that

[Blue_Cookeh]

Ubiquiti provide their NVR software for free if you go down that route. Our school are currently running about 12 Ubiquiti cameras on their NVR appliance and are now starting to hit the limits of that device. I'm looking at running the NVR software in an Uubuntu virtual machine on our Hyper-V cluster with a 6TB RAID array passed through to it. If our internet connection was reliable enough I'd then be shipping that up to Azure or AWS.

 

In terms of cameras when we started planning this stuff out (we went down the route of doing it ourselves too) we started out at looking exactly what we wanted to cover and where the cameras will go. Get the easy bit out of the way and make sure you have decent cable routes between cabs and your camera locations first. With Ubiquiti you don't have too much choice - UVC-G3-DOME for indoors and UVC-G3-AF for outdoor use in our case.

 

I couldn't recommend them enough to be honest - far cheaper than some solutions out there, police have praised the video quality when we provided footage to them, and they've been rock solid and get regular firmware updates.

[mikkydoos]

Dont buy budget Merit Lilin stuff. The cameras are ok but the NVR's are awful. Axis is your friend

[mavhc]

Given the quality of ip camera software, are there any that are open source, instead of full of security holes?

[dhicks]

One of the things I'm most unsure about is the best way to store the footage, for the number of cameras we are likely to have are DVRs, NAS or a Server better for the longer term (Bearing in mind scalability/ease of adding new devices, access to the footage by myself and SLT, updateability/'futureproofing' and so on)? I think that I should be able to bring pretty much all the network cables back to one location - our server room.

 

Ubiquiti / Hikvision cameras are maybe £150 each. What you need to spend on top of that depends on how your network is currently set up. A new server with some decent-sized harddrives for storage might cost around £1,000 (probably a bit cheaper, you don't need anything fancy, or you might already have a suitible device around). If you already have PoE-capable edge switches and cat5 cable runs to your camera locations then you just need to plug them in, otherwise you'll need to run cables to each location (which might involve external labour costs, or might simply be something you do yourself, with say £100 worth of tools and cable). Most of the cameras actually tend to come with PoE adaptors, so thye might be easier to plug in to power at the switch end rather than adding a separate power supply at the camera end.

[Bobbeh]

...police have praised the video quality when we provided footage to them...

 

That sounds promising as they've often laughed at ours!

 

 

 

Thanks for all the feedback.

 

Sorry, should have said it's a primary school (so relatively small site) and the current CCTV cabling all comes back to DVRs in the server room.

 

There is CAT 5 laid for the current cameras, however they just use 1 pair for the camera so there's normally multiple cameras coming off one cable so we will need to add some extra in for some areas, or relay depending how they've split it. It's a modern build so no asbestos to worry about which is a bonus though it will take a fair bit of time of course, but we will have to do it in stages as funds allow so it should be manageable.

 

We have some spare ports available on the PoE switch we use for wireless access points, though I was thinking it may be better to have it networked totally separate.

 

I am hoping to update our servers this year so sticking some news disks in one of them may be an option for an NVR.

 

I think no matter what we end up with it can't be much worse than what we've got now!

 

Cheers.

[dhicks]

There is CAT 5 laid for the current cameras, however they just use 1 pair for the camera so there's normally multiple cameras coming off one cable so we will need to add some extra in for some areas, or relay depending how they've split it.

 

As in you've got just one cable going from your core to a location around where you might want several cameras? We have a couple of places like that - we could have added extra cable runs, but the cheaper option was to buy one of Ubiquiti's mini PoE switches (around £150, I think), and small enough to be bolted reasonably unobtrousivly to a wall / ceiling. As long as you have somewhere to plug the switch into mains, you can run 4 or 8 PoE CCTV cameras from the one switch. The switches themselves are managable from Ubiquiti's software, too, so you can have one server to deal with both cameras and associated switches. You could even add a cheap, small UPS (£50 - £100) to power the switch and keep the cameras up in case of a power cut.

[MkII]

We went for all Hikvision. Modest res. 8 x 4Tb HDD NVR. New dedicated fibre network and 3 Cisco POE switches to handle everything. Came to £16k all in. 55 cameras.

Happy with the kit. Installed ready for last September. Looks like we over specced on the HDDs. Half that would have been ample.

[Chris_]

As in you've got just one cable going from your core to a location around where you might want several cameras? We have a couple of places like that - we could have added extra cable runs, but the cheaper option was to buy one of Ubiquiti's mini PoE switches (around £150, I think), and small enough to be bolted reasonably unobtrousivly to a wall / ceiling. As long as you have somewhere to plug the switch into mains, you can run 4 or 8 PoE CCTV cameras from the one switch. The switches themselves are managable from Ubiquiti's software, too, so you can have one server to deal with both cameras and associated switches. You could even add a cheap, small UPS (£50 - £100) to power the switch and keep the cameras up in case of a power cut.

 

Another option is the Ubiquiti Nanoswitch, powered via 24v POE, then provides 3x 24v POE outputs, only really useful if you're using Ubiquiti cameras that require 24v power.

 

https://linitx.com/product/ubiquiti-nanoswitch-4port-outdoor-switch-nsw/15220

[Katy]

We went with 38 Hikvision cameras and the 64 channel NVR with 4 x 4TB drives, did the entire install ourselves and it came in at about £6k. This doesn't include PoE switches as we already had sufficient spare capacity in our existing switches. Took 2 of us about 3 weeks to install including doing all the data cable runs

[AJWhite1970]

I took out an old 4 camera co-ax system and replaced it with a 20 camera unifi system with the NVR installed on a Windows 2016 Server with 4tb of storage. As others have said, about £150 per camera, the NVR software is free plus the cost of a file server if you don't already have one.

 

Can't praise it high enough, simple to install, manage and find video footage when needed.

 

Andrew

[tech-man]

We recently did a CCTV project with Net-Ctrl using Mobotix cameras. The cameras are brilliant & Net-Ctrl are knowledgable and couldn’t have been more helpful. We had some issues over the Christmas break and the Police got involved and they were really impressed with the image quality (even at night). Really worth looking at... give them a shout.

[XiJ]

Another option is the Ubiquiti Nanoswitch, powered via 24v POE, then provides 3x 24v POE outputs, only really useful if you're using Ubiquiti cameras that require 24v power.

 

https://linitx.com/product/ubiquiti-nanoswitch-4port-outdoor-switch-nsw/15220

 

While this can be a great solution my experience is that without mains power there isn’t enough Poe power for more than 1 AP. We did have a long cable to to PoE the switch though.

[caffrey]

Plan well ahead, I didn't and it's become a pain

 

That's the problem with Ubiquiti - so easy to keep adding stuff, I now need to see about splitting them onto their own IP range and storage and getting a proper server setup. I started with one camera and an old server under my desk to test - that server is still there and now I have 14 cameras... and we still need more

[Bobbeh]

Thanks for all the replies, really useful.

[dhicks]

Plan well ahead

 

Good point - also worth thinking about organising who has access to the CCTV system and making sure everyone involved knows the process for getting footage from it, both in the how-to-work-the-software sense and in the what-paperwork-needs-filling-in sense. We're in central London, and the police have obviously realised we have reasonable-quality CCTV available so we get several requests coming in for footage. It shouldn't be a problem, but it's woth ensuring that such requests can be dealt with quickly and easily by whoever needs to deal with it, not just by the IT department, otherwise it becomes yet another rush job for IT to become a botleneck with.

[Bobbeh]

Currently to view footage you need to physically go to the DVRs which are in our server room and that requires a key that only certain members of staff have. Most of our uses of footage so far have been for internal issues but we have had a couple of times where we've suffered vandalism and that has needed handing on to the police.

 

Do people tend to have their CCTV on a separate network, VLAN it off or just have it on the normal network?

Edited March 12, 2018 by Bobbeh

[Katy]

Currently to view footage you need to physically go to the DVRs which are in our server room and that requires a key that only certain members of staff have. Most of our uses of footage so far have been for internal issues but we have had a couple of times where we've suffered vandalism and that has needed handing on to the police.

 

Do people tend to have their CCTV on a separate network, VLAN it off or just have it on the normal network?

 

Ours is on the main physical network but on its own VLAN, with ACLs to only allow a certain other VLAN (containing the PCs we allow access from) to access it. Footage is downloaded from any PC (in the aforementioned VLAN) using IE. I think we have user accounts on the recorder for IT, facilities and security (although it tends to be security find the bit that is needed and I end up downloading it and putting it on CD)

[SEdwards]

We're currently awaiting our third and final quote for replacing our CCTV as well. So far we have two that want to provide Hikvision and one that provides D-Link. The D-Link solution is something I have experience with in my previous school and is a very good system. I'm very impressed with the quality of the Hikvision cameras though. Time will tell if they're the cheapest though!

[robjduk]

I did ours inhouse with a QNAP server which cost about £7-800 with 4TB installed. D-Link cameras (I was surprised as you are) are good for £400 ish. Licence cost per camera was about £20 and then whatever you want to spend on PoE and cabling and you are away.

 

Very easy to do yourself whatever route you go down. I find these companies take the total smeg on price. Total money for old rope and the system we put in kicks the arse of the one we used to spend a fortune on.