In The Trenches Video Series
Security Camera and CCTV Surge Protectors | How to Protect CCTV Cameras from Lightning
Today, we are discussing security camera surge protection, and how to protect CCTV cameras from lightning (direct or indirect) strikes, inductive loads, poor wiring, and the power grid itself.
Our speakers today are:
- > Micah Shearer
- > Benjamin Larue
- > Gil Illescas
- > Calver Brewer
Calver Brewer:
Inline search protection is, you have a surge protection device at the camera, and then you have your ethernet cabling going back to your head in, and then you have another surge protection device before your head end.
Ben Larue:
Hey everyone, thanks so much for joining us again for another session of In the Trenches Roundtable. Today's episode I think is extremely exciting because it's something that comes up more often than you'd think, but I don't think it's thought about from the beginning, and what I mean is surge. What is it? What does it mean? Who should be concerned and why? Those are some of the things that we'll be diving into today. And of course, we've got a great panel of experts with us. We've got Micah Shearer, our COO.
Micah Shearer:
Hi.
Ben Larue:
We've got Gil Illescas. He's our national installation director.
Gil Illescas:
Hi everybody.
Ben Larue:
And last, but certainly on not least, we've got Cal Brewer. He's our national project manager.
Calver Brewer:
Hey everyone.
Ben Larue:
Awesome. Between the three of them, we've got plenty of experience here. We're quasi experts in surge, at least what it means for IP security devices, and that's what kind of we'll be jumping into. I want to start off by level setting and making sure everyone's on the same page. What is surge and why should I be worried?
Calver Brewer:
Surge is just a wave of power, an electrical circuit that is just too much for the devices to handle. You should be concerned because it can completely destroy your IP security equipment.
Ben Larue:
Wow. Where do surges come from exactly then?
Calver Brewer:
Surges come from a variety of places. Externally, the most common is going to be lightning strikes. It could come from a direct lightning strike to a camera, a direct hit, or it can hit your house or your building, or it could come from a lightning strike in the proximity of your facility. Internally, it comes from inductive loads or poor wiring causing a ground fault in your wiring, or simply just plugging in too many devices to your surge protector.
Micah Shearer:
You can also get issues with the grid itself. If your local grid, it's not always completely stable, especially depending on where you're located, and you can get surges coming externally.
Ben Larue:
Makes sense. There's ways it can come externally, there's ways it can come internally. It can ruin my devices if it happens. Is it covered under warranty though?
Micah Shearer:
No. The short answer is no.
Gil Illescas:
How do you prove that?
Micah Shearer:
It counts as an act of God, essentially.
Gil Illescas:
How do you prove that, though? How do you prove that?
Micah Shearer:
It's not that hard to tell if a device has been fried when our technical support team gets it back.
Gil Illescas:
Smell test.
Micah Shearer:
Yeah. How would you describe that odor, Cal?
Calver Brewer:
Like a bad barbecue. I would say like a bad barbecue.
Micah Shearer:
If you're really bad at barbecuing, maybe you can get away with it, but otherwise it's going to be evident.
Ben Larue:
Gotcha. Not covered under warranty. But sounds like, is this something that happens common? Should I expect my camera to be struck by lightning?
Calver Brewer:
Depends on the area that you live. Obviously, the southeastern United States is going to be a little bit more common. Florida especially, they have a lot more lighting strikes each day, month, during the summer than we do in the other parts of the United States.
Micah Shearer:
I know Gil had, we were talking before this about having a lot of experience in certain parts of the country where the grid itself is more unstable.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah. That's that backend stuff that we talk about that's probably a little harder to tell if surge damaged the device, to be honest. Because you're not going to have that direct got blown up smell to it. It's going to be the electronics were affected, the motherboard got flashed. Something weird like that. Because remember, when some of these devices, like an NVR, an example, when it just shuts down without actually being powered down properly, it's like a car crash. So when surge hits the system and knocks the recorders offline, it can affect the electronics. But like I said, a little bit tougher to prove, but at the same time it happens, and it's why surge protection is available.
Micah Shearer:
Can we stay on that topic for just a second, or that type of surge and talk mitigation for just a second? Because that's the one that feels to me like the easiest to standardize your approach to, in a sense. If you're dealing with an unstable grid or something like that, pretty much putting your NVR, putting your switches on a surge protection device, they're not that much more expensive. You're not talking about additional labor, which reduces the cost there. That's the one where I would say it's pretty much prudent to always do this. We really like when we're doing the installation ourselves, these network addressable ones where we can remotely log in and power things off and on and do troubleshooting as well. But as long as it is a surge protection that is properly rated for the voltage you're dealing with, you can pretty much use any surge protector.
Ben Larue:
You're saying there's a way to save from the surge ruining my devices? Because I was getting worried there for a minute. I'm like starting to sweat over here thinking that all my devices are screwed.
Micah Shearer:
Lightning is trickier, so I kind of want to put that one in a different bucket for a second. But if the surge is coming basically from your outlet because there's something in your house, or your building, or something on the grid, you can get a surge protector. Don't confuse it with a power strip. Power strip is just adding a lot of outlets, essentially, a lot of extra plugs. But a surge protector is specifically designed to absorb at least a certain amount of electricity or energy. Gil, do you have any tips in selecting that surge protector?
Gil Illescas:
Not necessarily. Surge protection is going to block the overcurrent from happening when it's being drawn. But to stop dirty power brownouts, blackouts from affecting your electronic devices, that's where UPS, uninterruptable power source comes in, because those things will just not shut down at that point. They will be able to manage the actual spike in electrical, which causes the surge. It might shut it down before, but if it's on a UPS, it'll keep it running. Therefore, that car crash isn't happening.
Ben Larue:
UPS is considered a type of surge protector?
Gil Illescas:
No, because UPS is considered something that keeps the power going. So if there is a spike in electricity, it will handle that and absorb it, and not transit that to the device.
Micah Shearer:
Yes, so a traditional surge protector, and Gil and Cal, please correct me if I'm wrong here, that overage hits the surge protector, the surge protector shuts off, which creates that sudden loss of power in the NVR. The NVR is not then getting, it's not absorbing the impact of that power, but it is abruptly being turned off, and most electronics do not like being abruptly turned off. Probably going to be fine, but there is not a small chance that you can get issues that result of that abrupt loss of power. When you combine surge protection with a UPS or an uninterrupted power supply, you've got a battery in that UPS that holds some extra energy so that you can do a graceful shutdown of the device. They're not meant to sit there. Typically though, you get big enough ones, you can run the NVR for hours. They're not necessarily there to run that device for hours and hours and hours. They're there to run that device long enough to facilitate that graceful shut down.
Ben Larue:
What I'm hearing is, surge protection can come from internal sources, and that might be more of a concern than lightning protection?
Micah Shearer:
No, I think they're just different. It also depends on where you are. If you're in Florida, you probably got to be equally concerned about lightning strikes, if not more so.
Calver Brewer:
And also, it depends on how you have your cameras mounted as well. If you have your cameras mass mounted so you could achieve a better line of sight, then basically you have a lightning rod on your building, and you should definitely be concerned at that point.
Ben Larue:
Are there ways I can protect devices from lightning strikes?
Calver Brewer:
Not necessarily protect the devices. You can protect your NVR and your head end devices from lightning strikes taken by the camera using inline surge protection. Inline surge protection is, you have a surge protection device at the camera, and then you have your ethernet cabling going back to your head in, and then you have another surge protection device before your head end. Those protection devices, say your camera gets hit by lightning. You're going to lose the camera, and you're going to lose the first inline surge protection device that you have there, because they're self-sacrificing. That's where we go back to the bad barbecue smell. But yeah, I kind of forgot what you asked there and I'm rambling.
Ben Larue:
No, but there's ways to protect the devices from lightning strikes.
Micah Shearer:
Yeah, because what you really don't want to have happen is, it hits the camera, it travels down your cable, it takes out your switch, it keeps going, it takes out two more cameras. That's a bit of a catastrophic example, but you need to stop it before it affects other parts of the system as well, and that's where the inline surge protection will help. The other thing with an inline surge protection is a lightning strike doesn't have to just hit the camera. It could hit it the cable. And if you've got surge protection on both ends of that cable, then it hits the cable and it gets absorbed through those devices. They're really little. They're like this big, and you just literally plug it in and plug it in again.
Gil Illescas:
A lightning strike can hit the street and still affect the camera lines, basically. Actually, you rarely see a direct hit on the camera. When you do, that is that's a different animal.
Ben Larue:
So it might hit the corner of my building or something, a tree nearby or something.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, you usually see surge going down, there's from lightning strikes hitting near.
Ben Larue:
I see. But that line surge protection protects the devices after the device that gets directly affected.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah.
Micah Shearer:
Typically.
Ben Larue:
Because worst case, if you didn't have that inline, it could maybe hit the switch that the other cameras are connected to.
Calver Brewer:
Travel back to your NVR. It could travel from your NVR through an HDMI cord to your TV. It could take out any device that you have basically in your structure there. Just keep traveling down the line.
Gil Illescas:
These devices do help, and they do work, but they're not 100%.
Ben Larue:
How much are they? Is it worth it? I don't know. I'm just wondering.
Micah Shearer:
The device itself is not that expensive. You're looking at, what is it, $60 for a pair. Where you are actually going to see an increase in cost is the labor to install them, because you are installing them and you are grounding them. You're talking about running some extra cabling by potentially a grounding rod. So because of that, we do end up being strategic, because if you're paying as much for the camera as you are for the grounding, you end up having to weigh this equation. What is my risk of this getting hit, and is it more or less than just buying a new camera?
Gil Illescas:
Care less about cameras and care more about recorders.
Micah Shearer:
And switches and infrastructure. We typically are putting a surge protection device, usually it's before, it's from the plug to the switch. So if it gets hit along that line without the inline surge protection, then that doesn't actually help you. You have to map out, where are all the risk points? Where are all my devices that are in place to mitigate it? How much do each of those devices cost, both in the actual equipment and the labor, and what is the cost of the equipment that I'm protecting? And then, you layer in the likelihood basically of something bad happening.
We end up making a lot of strategic decisions around things like storage units. We won't inline surge protect all of the cameras, because that just gets astronomical. But we will all of the wireless backhaul antennas, because they're sticking up over the top of the building and are, as Cal referenced earlier, basically a lightning rod. So it makes sense economically to ground the antennas. It makes less sense economically to surge protect the antennas. It makes less sense economically to surge protect all of the cameras.
Ben Larue:
Kind of a cost analysis in a sense.
Micah Shearer:
Yeah.
Ben Larue:
Would someone like SCW be able to help with that? Or is that all on the client organization?
Gil Illescas:
Yeah. No, we can help with that for sure.
Ben Larue:
Awesome.
Micah Shearer:
Where we're going to be a little less able to help you assess your risk is things like your internal wiring on your building. Do you have a history of devices getting fried? We don't really know that. Do you have a history? Is your network, or excuse me, are you in someplace in California that's constantly having brownouts? We don't have that insight. We would need to lean on your knowledge of your own facility in that context.
Calver Brewer:
There are also lightning mitigation companies that that's what they do, is they assess the risk and they give you a solution.
Ben Larue:
It sounds like customers in high lightning prone areas should probably consider it a little bit more. Also sounds like places where that might experience brownouts or rolling blackouts should consider these type of things?
Micah Shearer:
Mm-hmm.
Ben Larue:
And is it easier-
Micah Shearer:
I must say, older buildings as well.
Ben Larue:
I was just going to ask, is it harder to retrofit older buildings with surge protection or?
Micah Shearer:
I wouldn't say so, because most of the surge protection is designed as a sort of layering on, in a similar way to a retrofit. What I meant by older buildings is just like your circuitry is older, more prone to have issues, versus a new build where everything's clean and crisp and recently inspected.
Ben Larue:
Makes me feel a lot better about lightning strikes and surge in general. Because for a little bit there, I was feeling a little scared.
Gil Illescas:
Did you say surge in general?
Calver Brewer:
He did just say surge in general.
Micah Shearer:
He did.
Ben Larue:
Surge in general. Let's go. Let's go. Shameless plug for the good old surgeon general. If you're out there watching Mr. Surgeon General, you're welcome.
Gil Illescas:
Thanks, sir. You protect.
Micah Shearer:
Is this right now where I admit that I'm not sure who our surgeon general currently is?
Ben Larue:
I don't know. I don't know either, so I didn't say his name.
Micah Shearer:
I know it's not Fauci, but...
Ben Larue:
That was awesome. Thanks so much. I really appreciate. Shout out to our quasi expert panel here for helping us out on surge protections. Makes me feel a lot better. If you ever have questions or need help in terms of IP security equipment and protecting them or mitigating that surge risk, please contact SCW. All of our contact info will be in the description below, along with any of the resources that we referenced or mentioned today. Really appreciate it. Thank everyone for their time again, and we'll see you next week for another session.
Micah Shearer:
Bye.
Ben Larue:
Thanks so much.