In The Trenches Video Series
Mounting Security Cameras to Ceilings
Today, we are discussing mounting security cameras to ceilings and things to consider for your installation project.
Our speakers today are:
- > Benjamin Larue (Sales Director)
- > Micah Shearer (COO, CFO & wearer of many other hats)
- > Gil Illescas (Director of installation services)
- > Calver Brewer (National Installation Project Manager)
Video Transcription
Gil Illescas:
It's like there's false hard ceilings where they're just made of plaster, they're just made of drop, I mean of drywall and one step on them and you're right through them. It's hard to tell until you're actually up there really.
Ben Larue:
Hi everyone. Welcome to another In The Trenches episode. Today is going to be an installation focus episode. Remember on these videos we cover the things you should be considering and thinking about in terms of installation of a physical security system. And so we've got our also awesome panel of experts here with us again today. Excited to dive into the topic of ceilings. Something we're always going to run into and usually installations involve, but something rarely covered or thought about. So I want to spend some time today with the team here and dive into ceilings. And we're going to start, I think by talking about what kind of cameras would we typically mount to a ceiling. You guys think that's a good place to start?
Gil Illescas:
Something really small and light. We'll get there.
Ben Larue:
No, absolutely. Okay. So that actually brings up a good point-
Micah Shearer:
So not the giant PTZ that weighs like 30 pounds?
Gil Illescas:
Give it a go. See what happens.
Ben Larue:
That's right, that's right.
Micah Shearer:
Make my day.
Gil Illescas:
Right.
Ben Larue:
Actually, I think a better place to start. I stand corrected. I correct myself. I think a better place to start is actually ceiling types in general. Let's cover that first. Let's talk about the thing that you already have before we talk about the cameras that might go there.
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, so I mean there's a few types of ceilings that come to mind when I think about commercial structures: exposed ceilings being probably the most common one that we run into. That's where you have your open mechanical structures and all the utilities you can see above your head, so you can kind of know where to route your cabling and know what you're working with, not have to deal with something like a drop ceiling or a suspended ceiling where you have all your tiles and everything suspended from the ceiling, so you have your wiring and your mechanical in between the tiles and the floor above. Those are probably the two most for common types I would say that we run into.
Micah Shearer:
Would you say Cal that the open ceilings are easier typically for running your cable pathways, but present some additional challenges for where exactly and how exactly you mount your camera whereas your closed ceiling that's got with ceiling tiles, it's a little easier to know, okay, here's where I'm mounting it, but there's some more complexities around the actual pathways?
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, I mean one thing you got to take into account whenever you're doing exposed ceilings is you got to make sure your work looks good because it's very easily inspected when they walk on site. They can just look up and see all the work that you've done, so you can't make any obvious mistakes there. You got to make sure [inaudible 00:03:01] everything up.
Micah Shearer:
We have some photographs comparing some work from a recent job of ours and someone else's.
Ben Larue:
Absolutely.
Gil Illescas:
And we actually have a ceiling inspection going on right now at one of our job sites as we speak.
Ben Larue:
Yeah like currently actually. And so I just quickly want to make sure everyone's on the same page. And an exposed ceiling type would be something you would see if you walked into a Home Depot or Lowe's and looked up. That's typically what we mention or what we mean when we mention-
Micah Shearer:
Or if you're here in Nashville, every single restaurant ever.
Ben Larue:
Right? Absolutely. Right. Or your Walmart superstores. Think of your big warehouses, manufacturing facilities, those type of things. And then ceiling tile, you can envision in maybe your home's finished basement, right? You'd kind of have a drop tile ceiling there.
Micah Shearer:
Lots of office spaces-
Gil Illescas:
Offices.
Ben Larue:
Offices. Yeah.
Micah Shearer:
tend to have them because they're good for sound absorption, so people drop those ceilings down and the tiles absorb the sound.
Ben Larue:
And to Cal's point earlier, you can run your piping, all that stuff in between the space there. But back to your point, Micah exposed ceilings. Some considerations to think about when we talk about those.
Micah Shearer:
Obstructions is the biggest one that jumps out to me. If you mount it all the way at the top on the actual roof, then you often have your views obstructed by your duct work, your iron girders, whatever is supporting that ceiling. Sometimes you can mount to the actual support structures. I know Cal and Gil, you guys can probably speak to that better than I can.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, you can mount to the joists or rebar. There's a lot of different versions up there that account for what holds up a ceiling so to speak. But remembering to drop down below for good view is the key in thing and lighting seems to be a big problem too because you don't want your lighting in front of a camera view. It can affect the camera picture for sure. So getting an assessment of everything that's dropping down from the ceiling when you first start you're doing your cable runs and even when you're picturing how your cameras are going to be mounted and what they're viewing, it's going to be very important to know how far you're dropping.
Micah Shearer:
And let's talk about dropping. What does that actually mean? I know there's a couple different methodologies for that.
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, no, we supply these custom pendant mounts for our cameras that drop the camera. They're just basically a piece of painted conduit that match the camera aesthetic and they drop the cameras down. So you can mount the pendant mounts to say a joist and then you can choose how long you want if you want to make it custom so you can get a 10 feet piece of conduit and drop it all the way down 10 feet. Or if you only need it down three feet, cut the conduit, mount it three feet below, just whatever you need to get the view that you're looking for.
Micah Shearer:
And our standard electrical mounting boxes are threaded in such a way that that's standard rigid conduit will just thread right into the back.
Calver Brewer:
Correct.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. And it makes it easier to bring the cabling down to the camera too. 'Cause that way it's not free ran, it's kind of hidden inside either the pipe or the conduit, whatever we're using to drop the camera down where it goes. So yeah, there's ways to feed it where the back box it's attached to the camera we'll feed right into the camera and you don't see it at all. The only places you should really see cabling, obviously, if you're really looking hard and it's up there in the joist, you got to try to hide it your best that you can up there. But it's up there somewhere and it's also going back down somewhere because it's got to connect back to wherever the head end is, MDF/IDF, wherever your switch is or your MDR is. So-
Micah Shearer:
What about the labor? What about the labor impact of different ways of supporting the cable on different ceiling support structures? So extra time involved in drilling through steel beams versus other types of beams?
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean sometimes you have your standard Wilson joists that they're kind of W-shaped and you can route your cable through the corner of that. And so you don't really necessarily have to use any extra material other than zip ties or something to tie it to the joists. But sometimes you have to run your cable along beams or whatever and so you have to attach like J-hooks or something to those beams to drop the cable down. So it definitely impacts the labor time. If you have to use J-hooks or something like that, it's going to take a lot more time to install those and throughout the cable into those, then it would be just to run your cable through the joist and attached it to the joist directly.
Gil Illescas:
J-hooks, like you said, bridle rings. They're all types of devices that connect in and you will go through lots of bits on your drill when you're drilling through some of this material that's up there because it definitely takes a toll on your equipment, but it's part of the job, it's what you do.
Ben Larue:
Awesome. That's great. Yeah. So that is exposed ceilings to a T. What dropping a camera might mean, why would we want to drop a camera
Micah Shearer:
To avoid obstruction of the view from a physical object or impairing the camera view because of the light, the way the light is hitting the camera itself. We see a lot of duct work sort of camera views that have duct work running down the sides of them. Those kinds of things.
Gil Illescas:
Or specific shots. Specific shots. You can see some really deep drops at some big warehouse stores where they're dropping down to see the what's going on at the cash registers. So I've seen 30 foot drops, you know what I mean? It looks crazy but it happens. And-
Micah Shearer:
Yes, I feel like time you're in a Lowes or a Walmart, if you look up you'll see long pendants dropping down from the ceiling with a camera on it, typically a dome or something like that.
Gil Illescas:
Right.
Ben Larue:
And that is absolutely all correct. And what I was getting at there is height of ceiling. Most exposed ceilings are extraordinarily tall, much taller than your traditional drop tile ceiling might be. And so dropping a camera will help lower that camera down into the field of view that you're interested in.
Micah Shearer:
So as you're not just getting the tops of people's heads.
Ben Larue:
Exactly. Exactly.
Gil Illescas:
Absolutely.
Ben Larue:
But with exposed ceilings, there's a lot of things to consider there. That's awesome. So let's dive into the other ceiling type that's most commonly found, ceiling tiles. And most people would think of a ceiling tile and a camera or any other physical security equipment and think, "Oh I can just mount to the tile and pop it back in there." But it's not that easy, right?
Gil Illescas:
No.
Micah Shearer:
Don't look at historical SCW guides on mounting to ceiling tiles. They are wrong.
Calver Brewer:
They are wrong.
Ben Larue:
There's an asterisks. We stand corrected. We've learned from our mistakes. No, absolutely. I'm sure Gil, Cal, you can all dive in here.
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, I mean with ceiling tiles, the one thing to take into account as far as code goes is you need to have a point of contact from the camera or the camera mounting box to the actual structure. So say you have your ceiling tile and you have your camera that's mounted sitting inside the ceiling tile. So you can see what's going on below the ceiling tile on the back of the ceiling tile, the unexposed side, you need to have some sort of enclosure for the connection point from the cabling to the camera. So your termination is enclosed and then that enclosure that's attached to the ceiling tile needs to be attached to the actual ceiling grid that the tile is sitting in. And the back of the electrical mounting box that's attached to the ceiling tile needs to be attached with grid wire. It's just small, this metal wire that they use to hold the ceiling grids up.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, it's aluminum wire. Yeah.
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, aluminum wire. You can attach that to the beams or the joists above so the camera's supported. If it just falls out of the ceiling tile, it won't drop and hurt someone. It'll be supported and hang there.
Gil Illescas:
Yep. And- Go ahead. I'm sorry Micah.
Micah Shearer:
I was just saying you can buy some of these mounting kits so to speak, pre-fabricated to make it a little bit easier. It adds a little bit of cost but it means you're not having to source all the individual parts and pieces.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, it's all about support, obviously. There's different ways, Cal pretty much gave the best way to do it, but I've seen, you could cut a piece of plywood and put it up there and mount the camera to it and it helps spread the weight out basically. And it's effective and it works. Will it pass code on a new construction? Probably not, but you can do it on probably a retrofit. What Cal basically explained is probably the best way for any new construct, new construction to do it for sure. But we have, there's other codes we have to remember too because remember once we have a drop ceiling tile in and there's space between the drop ceiling tile and the actual ceiling, we got to plan and return. So we got to an air return issue. Right. So what's the big deal about that right? Well Micah, tell us what the big deal is.
Micah Shearer:
It all has to do with not dying of hazardous fumes in a fire essentially.
Gil Illescas:
That's exactly right.
Ben Larue:
That's it.
Micah Shearer:
Yeah. If a space is being used for air return, you have to put cable in it that is going to basically not kill you as it melts. So you need quote unquote plenum rated cable, which does add some extra expense. Now a drop ceiling is not necessarily a plenum space if it's not being used for air return. Right Gil?
Gil Illescas:
That's correct.
Micah Shearer:
But frequently they are.
Gil Illescas:
But how can you tell? Sometimes you can't.
Micah Shearer:
Is there enclosed duct work? Yeah.
Gil Illescas:
Sometimes you can't, so you're better safe than sorry. And you better just go with plenum cable.
I don't know Cal, have you ever run into this? Because there's also situations where they require other things up there in the ceiling to be plenum-rated, which means back boxes and things like that. You ever ran into that?
Calver Brewer:
Yeah. Yeah. In kind of, let's see hospitals, that's probably the most common space that I've run into stuff like that. And also too with buildings like hospitals that sometimes they have a different ceiling type, which is called an interstitial ceiling type. And that's like an area in between the drop ceiling and the floor of the next ceiling. It's kind of the same premises as a suspended ceiling, but it's a little bit bigger of a space. And usually those spaces are used for air return. Sometimes they're big enough to where you can get up there and walk around in between floors.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah.
Calver Brewer:
It's pretty crazy.
Micah Shearer:
Wow.
Gil Illescas:
Very good point.
Calver Brewer:
And usually those spaces are used for air return so they are plenum spaces.
Ben Larue:
That a good point. That's awesome. And before we segue to any other ceiling type finish off on ceiling tiles, those are some of the main concerns. Would we recommend typically mounting to a ceiling tile? There's plenty of applications where we would.
Gil Illescas:
Oh yeah.
Micah Shearer:
Oh yeah.
Gil Illescas:
Absolutely.
Calver Brewer:
Absolutely.
Micah Shearer:
It's not about not mounting to the ceiling tile. It's about the ceiling tile itself, that plasticy grid not being what's supporting the weight of the camera.
Ben Larue:
Beautiful. Perfect.
Gil Illescas:
I will say there are cameras that can be mounted directly to a ceiling tile. They are light enough and small enough.
Calver Brewer:
Yes.
Gil Illescas:
To be supported.
Micah Shearer:
If you look up the specs on the actual ceiling tile, that'll tell you the weight considerations. Is that right Gil?
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, that's true.
Ben Larue:
Aren't there some special type of fancy mounting kit you can use. Like a ceiling tile mounting?
Micah Shearer:
Yeah, I mean if you literally Google ceiling tile mounting kit, there's tons of options.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah there's a bunch.
Yeah, they sell them to mostly like... Electricians, they're like the experts at this stuff. So they have stuff like that. People that put in fire alarm systems, that's another big one. Because they're putting a lot of devices up on the ceiling and if they're actually doing sprinkler systems, they're cutting into tiles a lot too, so they're very familiar with that kind of stuff. So any distribution that helps those trades along with us, they're going to have ample devices to help with these situations for sure.
Ben Larue:
Awesome, awesome. That's perfect. That puts a bow in ceiling tiles. That's great. So exposed ceilings, ceiling tiles, probably the two most common that we see. Another common one though that we run into often, at least SCW we run into, because we work with a lot of houses of worship would be plaster or hard ceilings.
Gil Illescas:
The dreaded hard lid.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. I didn't almost want to bring it up, but...woowee.
Gil Illescas:
That's the worst.
Ben Larue:
Got to talk about it, you know?
Gil Illescas:
Yes we do.
Ben Larue:
Why is it the worst, Gil?
Gil Illescas:
Because you got to crawl up above it and you got to make sure it can hold your weight.
Ben Larue:
I know.
Gil Illescas:
There's a lot of stuff to be careful of up there. It's not a situation where you can just peek your head up and look and see what's above that, like a drop ceiling tile or an exposed ceiling, you just look. You got no idea. So you actually kind of go, got to go up and check it out and you don't know what's going on up there and you don't know if it's really a false, it's like there's false hard ceilings where they're just made of plaster, they're just made of drop or I mean of drywall and one step on them and you're right through them. It's hard to tell until you're actually up there really looking at it and walking around and seeing what you can step on versus what you can't. Very important.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. And that brings up a good point about hard ceilings is that even accessing them to where you can see inside is sometimes part of the battle.
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes you have a point of egress or something really important that you want to put a camera on that ceiling to be able to see, but there's no access to that hard ceiling in that particular area. So I mean sometimes you have to get really crafty and cut your own access hatches and install access hatches so you can take a look up there and route the cable and be able to fish the cable to the camera location. Sometimes it's hard ceilings make things very, very difficult. Add a lot of labor as well.
Micah Shearer:
Do you want to speak to what you do with a hard ceiling if you can't get access, if you can't route the cable above it?
Gil Illescas:
Well, I mean we've [inaudible 00:17:34].
Calver Brewer:
[inaudible 00:17:34]
Micah Shearer:
We end up using Panduit sometimes and [inaudible 00:17:36]
Gil Illescas:
Yeah we ran into this and you offer those solutions. A lot of it's going to be surface mount solutions that you offer. So you say Panduit, which is like a plastic thin conduit, [inaudible 00:17:48] wire mold, very good. Stuff like that that's going to be exposed or something that people can see. Then it's really up to the customer if they want that, they have to make that decision. We had a project here locally where there was no access, no access that we could get was either cut in or exposed and they weren't having it and they just said, you know what, we're just not going to put cameras up in this area. So it's really up to the owner's discretion, but Cal probably has some other examples of that too.
Calver Brewer:
Not off the top of my head. You kind of put me on the spot Gil. No I'm just kidding.
Ben Larue:
I'll tap in there. No, I think hospitality, think of hotels, vestibule areas, lobby areas, [inaudible 00:18:34]
Micah Shearer:
Or historical buildings sometimes.
Ben Larue:
Historical buildings, absolutely.
Calver Brewer:
Historical buildings for sure.
Gil Illescas:
Churches.
Ben Larue:
Churches, all these things.
Micah Shearer:
We could do a whole session on churches.
Gil Illescas:
We could.
Ben Larue:
Yeah.
Calver Brewer:
And then residential structures, which we're not really covering in this, but pretty much every residential structure that you deal with is going to have-
Gil Illescas:
Every single one.
Calver Brewer:
Every one of them.
Micah Shearer:
Yeah.
Gil Illescas:
And the tough part is when you have multi-level, so you may have a ceiling here and then it goes to a big exposed room and then you have other ceilings on the other side and it's like, okay, how am I getting through the big exposed room to the other side if that's where I got to go? So..
Calver Brewer:
Those vaulted ceilings are what they call tray ceilings, the ones that have the... Yeah, yeah. Those are very, very hard to deal with sometimes. Let's see, recently I did a house, there's a really, really large house, like a seven-bedroom house and they had I think four different attics that were all at four different levels to account for the vaulted ceilings. So you know, have to go from one attic to another attic to another attic and then you usually try to follow the chimney down to the basements where you can route your cabling. It's just hard ceilings and tray ceilings, vaulted ceilings, they make things very difficult.
Gil Illescas:
And this is all leaning toward making sure that when you're designing the system and coming up with your scope of work, you got to do a lot of homework ahead of time because you don't want any of this to bite you where because it will, if you don't get up there and get into it to figure out what exactly is around where your paths are and what's up there, you got no chance of having a successful product.
Ben Larue:
Absolutely. That's why at SCW we would recommend having someone on the facilities team or someone that has a knowledge of the facility to be on the call with one consultants designing the scope for these reasons. Understanding what type of ceiling types you have, what might be running where all of these things. Gil mentioned a good point too about multi-level and the change of different ceiling types. That's a factor. In some buildings, in some situations where ceiling types change and height drastically, there's firewalls that now need to be penetrated and there's a multitude of different complications-
Gil Illescas:
More code issues right there dealing with firewalls. Because you better get those right because if someone inspects and they're wrong, there's going to be trouble coming.
Calver Brewer:
Yeah. When you get into the above ceiling work permits, as soon as you start dealing and penetrating with firewalls, it's absolutely necessary that you pull in above ceiling work permit.
Gil Illescas:
Absolutely.
Ben Larue:
So yeah, if you have any of those complexities and you're not sure exactly where to go or who to turn to, SCW offers full turnkey solution install.
SCW offers total turnkey installation services, we'd be happy to help and we handle these type of complexities all the time. Feel free to reach out.
Gil Illescas:
Absolutely. For sure.
Ben Larue:
So that covers the major ceiling types. Let's talk back about, let's go back to and talk about what type of cameras we'd recommend mining to different ceilings. So we covered a little bit with drop tile in mentioning that there's some smaller profile, lower profile, lighter cameras that might work.
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, I guess with our camera line it would be like the Informant and the Deputy. Those are probably what I'd recommend for ceiling tiles and the Sheriff as well. Any kind of dome or turret cameras.
Ben Larue:
The Radiuses.
Gil Illescas:
Radiuses.
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, the radius also. The fisheye cameras would be perfect for a higher ceiling so you can get a good feel of view of the entire room.
Gil Illescas:
And we joked in the beginning about small and light, but you can mount a lot of different types of cameras and if you really want to PTZ indoor, which people do and you can do it.
Micah Shearer:
You can do it.
Gil Illescas:
A Pantel Zoom camera for anyone that's wondering, but you just need to make sure that you're supporting it properly. That's all. I mean it supports the key. You can put anything you want, you can install anything you want as long as it's supported properly, that's all.
Ben Larue:
That's right, absolutely. And just be sure you're paying attention to the different options that you have available to you. There's different PTZ models for different applications. Garrison would be a good example of a PTZ model we would want to use indoors in a drop tile situation.
Gil Illescas:
Absolutely.
Ben Larue:
Whereas like a Lookout 2.0 or a Scope certainly would not.
Gil Illescas:
Right.
Ben Larue:
That's pretty clear. Micah mentioned earlier-
Micah Shearer:
I mean if your definition of indoors an airplane hangar then it might be appropriate, but outside of that.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. Right. Right. Well I was actually just going to segue and say that Micah, you mentioned earlier that dome cameras are typically what we see mounted to ceilings. Just generally because most of the time ceilings are indoors and dome cameras usually work best, but Gil, cal, Micah, we've all been a part of projects where we mounted other types of cameras besides dome cameras to the ceilings. Anything jump out or come to mind?
Micah Shearer:
I mean some of it is what field of view you're looking for. If you're looking down an aisle and you're not actually going to get the benefit of the more expansive field of view that you usually have with a turret or a dome, a bullet can be the right choice because you're going to get a little bit farther because as you narrow, you get more distance. So that can be a better use of those variables. What else comes to mind for you guys?
Calver Brewer:
Yeah, like you said, warehouses, any kind of application where you're going to have shelving or that create the aisles like you said. Yeah, that's one of the big ones that jumps out where you're going to use a bullet indoors and then airplane hangar. I've actually done a couple of airplane hangars as well. Yeah, you can mount whatever kind of cameras you want in those ceiling so they're high enough.
Ben Larue:
Definitely. I'm thinking of a logistics client that we have locally where we have some larger PTZ models indoors for them to zoom around and look at different loading bays. Right.
Micah Shearer:
Yeah. And we see radiuses as well. I mean those are pretty frequently. We have a one on our demo that you can see in our office because it gives a really good sort of 360 if you have a wide area and you lose a little bit of detail sometimes it kind of depends on how far down it is or I guess how high it's mounted. But you cover a lot more territory with only one camera, so there are times where that's a good choice as well.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah. Also the other thing you want to keep in mind, especially back in the open ceiling arena is that lots of times you have to consider what it's going to take to service some of this stuff. And remember a lot of times it's probably going to take requiring a lift to install them. By a lift, I mean like a scissor lift, even a boom lift at times just to run the cable. Sometimes you can get to the camera without a lift, but you need a lift to run the cable. But these are all considerations that have to be made when you're installing stuff like that because stuff will go wrong. Things will happen. Cameras aren't perfect and they do go out or anything can cause you to have to troubleshoot. And if you have to get up there and troubleshoot, think about how the easiest way you're going to do that down the road, while you're installing the system.
Ben Larue:
Absolutely. It's a really great point, Gil. Appreciate you bringing it up. Absolutely. That's why a lot of this planning needs to be done ahead of time. A lot of these considerations need to be thought of and why we make the videos that we make. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Well, I think that about does it. That covers the ceiling types, the main ones that we see in majority of the time and interact with some of the obstacles, how we tackle those obstacles and then different cameras we might use in different applications.
I really appreciate everyone's time today. Thank you so much for everyone's input. There's going to be a ton of links to some of the products, some of the resources that we have on our website below in the description. So be sure to check those out.
If you have any comments or feedback, leave them below as well. Until next time, thanks so much for tuning in.
Gil Illescas:
Bye gang.
Micah Shearer:
Bye.
Gil Illescas:
See you.