In The Trenches Video Series

How to maintain your security camera system

Security cameras can get get dirt, dust, grease, grime, and even visits from spiders that can affect your image quality dramatically. In this episode we'll talk about how you check your camera system, how frequently, and when needed how to clean it properly.

Our speakers today are:

• > James Campbell
• > Micah
• > Gil Illescas
• > Calver

James Campbell:

How do we clean these things off of it? What's the process? What do you use for that? A

Micah:

Squirt gun.

James Campbell:

Squirt gun. Yes, definitely. What are those things called?

Micah:

Water balloons. Super soakers. Yeah, super soakers. There you go.

James Campbell:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode in the Trenches series. This is going to be one of our installation series and we're going to be talking about something that not everyone thinks about and that's maintaining and cleaning your cameras. You ever think you have to do that? Well, you probably do. I've got our installation experts here. Say hello everybody.

Gill Illescas:

Hi

Micah:

Everybody.

James Campbell:

Yeah, so I think we're going to talk about a couple different topics with this is number one, how do we even check our camera system? How do we make sure that things are as good as they were when we actually first installed it or when you first installed it? And then how do we clean cameras so we know lots of things can affect the image, and then what about any other things we need to maintain like our software and firmware and all that kind of stuff. So that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the first one, which should be how do we check our camera system? How do I know I've installed my system six months ago? How do I know if it's still operating as good as it was when I first installed it?

Gill Illescas:

Exactly installed?

Micah:

I mean pretty simply an initial check is to be just to go look at the footage. The one thing you really have to make sure you do is look at it both during the day and at night because sometimes issues with spiderwebs aren't going the i r abouts fact that that creates is not going to show up in the daytime footage. So you do want to make sure that you're looking at both daytime images and nighttime images,

James Campbell:

And so we're going to be looking at both of them. Day, night, go back to playback, look at it live. We just mentioned spiderwebs coming from a support background. I know how often these things happen. What is that? I mean, we can show pictures in here, but why are spiderweb so destructive to night vision?

Micah:

I mean because they reflect the ir and then it's the same as this side of a building or a license plate. Anytime you shine that infrared on a highly reflective surface, it bounces back and it's going to wash out the image so you won't actually be able to see anything. So the daytime, it'll look fine because you see through spiderweb, it's not really that obvious, but at night you won't be able to see anything. It'll just be white

Gill Illescas:

Spiderwebs bleed. I was going to say if there's spiderwebs, then there's a spider and I've had a lot of video be blocked because spiders like to walk in front of the lenses and then it looks like a Godzilla movie. And so you want to do the physical check too. You want to actually, if you have a sense that there might be something out there on the camera or lens, definitely want to go physically check.

Micah:

The other thing I feel like we're looking for on a regular basis is a camera. Sometimes somebody came through and you didn't notice and they just swapped it aside. So when you're looking at that footage, you're looking to just check, is this camera still looking at what I wanted it to be looking at?

James Campbell:

Or even if maybe if you didn't tighten it enough, that could definitely happen

Calver:

Out the tongue. I mean outside of the physical impediments of things actually moving the camera or affecting the image too, it's really important just to periodically check that your network connection and everything is all good. You're actually recording. Your hard drives are actually storing footage and playback for you to view. I'd say that's equally as important, if not more so than checking the images to make sure there's no spiderwebs or nothing's moved or changed physically want to make sure that it's operating and still on your network like it was when you initially set it up and configured everything.

Gill Illescas:

Yeah, Cal makes a good point here because a lot of people don't realize that how far back their recording can go before it starts overriding over itself. And if you don't do what Cal just said and check this periodically, you might be writing over stuff you wanted to save or didn't realize it was going to go. So that's very important part of it. Not a lot of people do it unfortunately,

James Campbell:

And there are some certain things you can set up alerts for, and I know we probably can have an episode on the alerts themselves as far as if you're having hard drive issues and stuff like that, but obviously it's still good to double check that stuff that you can do too. I want to cover getting dirty and all that stuff with the cameras. There's definitely certain environments or industries that probably need that have more risk of not necessarily spiderwebs, but before we got on here, we're talking about kitchens and kitchen nightmares potentially. And one of the nightmares you might have if you have cameras in there is you cook, you're a steakhouse, you're cooking steaks all day that these cameras are going to be all greasy and that could affect the night vision dramatically too. What are some other industries or areas that people should be maybe especially careful diligent on checking these cameras?

Micah:

I would say any kind of high dust environment. I mean, we have people operating where there's machinery and you get filaments and dust, for lack of a better word,

Calver:

Anytime a type of manufacturing or processing environment. I mean, we've got some clients like a chicken plant that one cameras get pretty dirty pretty often and not just from the actual food processing process, but then cleaning and spraying and stuff as well. You might not instantly notice a couple of drops of water on the face or the lens of your camera, but as that dries and the chemicals, they can really start to show up after time, so then more and more drops. You kind of have a layer of film that starts to build up and that can really affect the functionality of your camera.

James Campbell:

Car washes, same kind of theory.

Yeah, if you're working with chemicals, that's definitely one. You want to make sure the cameras are not consistently having 'em on there, but also just living on there where they can etch into the metal and the lens parts and everything like that. Actually, yeah, I think those are good ones. If you are in manufacturing, if you've got dust, dirt particles in the air, even cart repair potentially, you got brake dust, you got exhaust, and if you have that in a bay or something like that, then it's very likely that stuff will eventually stick onto that too. So anywhere outside. Yeah, well actually near oceans, the salt mist and the sea mist, it really corrodes

Calver:

Really fast.

James Campbell:

We used to run into that a lot for just anything with systems mounted around beaches and anything where there's weather around ocean environments and of course

Calver:

Ships.

James Campbell:

Yeah, for sure. After a bad storm, check your cameras as well. Maybe

Calver:

Just the cameras too cable as well, especially in a beach or near water environment that copper and metal and all the connectors will corrode over time and drop your cameras offline equally as quickly as dust or any kind of impediment. Well,

James Campbell:

Perfect. I think that gives us a good idea of why you check in the first place, how little bit you check at day night, and then also industries that probably need to check a little bit more frequently. But speaking of frequency in general, how often should people be checking their cameras?

Micah:

I think it is very reflective of the specific environment you have the cameras in. If you're talking about sort of a run of the mill office setting, I would probably recommend going down like a system health checklist quarterly, making sure checking the logs, making sure cameras aren't dropping off, looking at the footage day and night, making sure nothing has moved or gotten obstructed. But if you're in any of these environments with a lot of corrosive chemicals, water, dust, exterior cameras, you might want to check more frequently. Some of it is also going to come down to that risk reward situation. What is the consequence of missing footage for a couple of days? Because a spiderweb came in, so spider came and built a web in front of your camera. If that risk is very, very high, well you probably need to check more frequently, especially during whatever peak spider web building season is. If your risk is low, then you're weighing your time effectively.

James Campbell:

Yep, good summary. Really. I think we just need to check it when's possible, but also try to put it on a calendar. I think that's what I usually recommend customers is do a quarterly check like you mentioned, and spend the 15, 20 minutes it takes and then you're good for another quarter. But again, yeah, it does depend so much on location. Anybody else have anything to add to that or did we wrap that up pretty quickly?

Calver:

Not necessarily just the location or the environment that the cameras are in, but the products or merchandise or whatever they're meant to monitor. So if you've got something, say like a huge classic car collection that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and you have your camera watching those cars, then you're going to want to check on that pretty frequently to make sure that you're still getting that captured footage. Now, if it's a camera at your, I don't know, vacation house and it's just watching the house, maybe not so often because I don't know, I don't really going at

James Campbell:

Risk and reward as far as what the camera's looking like. And I think another thing I would add on too, thinking about that is how often are you already looking at your cameras? You just mentioned some people look at their cameras every single day and have it on a dedicated monitor where they look at 'em every single day and they sort of have a good idea of what the system's doing. Other people install a camera system and don't look at 'em for until they get a call that says, Hey, we had an incident, and that could be months and months in between incidents. And you definitely don't want to be in a situation where you're months and months in between an incident and you go pull out that camera and it's got daddy long legs in front of it and he's dancing all over your camera instead of the incident you need. So that's probably another factor to consider too. I mean,

Calver:

It's just

Gill Illescas:

Like a car,

Calver:

Right? If you don't maintain your car,

Gill Illescas:

You're going to have a problem.

James Campbell:

Yeah,

Calver:

There's no difference.

James Campbell:

One thing that this does seem like checking it, we know why and how, and maybe the frequency a little bit. This might seem like a lot of time for some people. Is there anything that s E W can do to maybe help with that?

Micah:

Yeah, this is the thumbs up is cracking me up here. I mean, yeah, what we call it is a system health check, and we'll do them for folks either one time. If you have a system that you want us to do a deep dive into, we'll also do it at regular intervals. We have folks who literally have our team log in and go through a full detailed system health check every week, and we have people who have us do it quarterly. Now when we do a system health check, we are checking for these physical things like the footage during the day and the night. We're also doing things like checking the hard drives, checking and updating the firmware, documenting settings. And I think that is a resource that we intend to make available to folks so that you can do it yourself or you can have us do it, whatever kind of fits your needs and your time cost analysis the best. Yeah,

James Campbell:

Exactly. So if a lot of people I think know that now, okay, I got to check these cameras got to clean, but yeah, maybe I'll do that tomorrow and it's something that's easy

Micah:

To miss. Yeah,

James Campbell:

I mean we've seen so many look at news stories of major incidents. I know there was an incident in New York City and they mentioned that something like a third of their cameras in the subway system are inoperable and it's like because it's just deferred maintenance essentially. So cool. Now that we've kind of covered that part, let's talk about the actual, you got spiderwebs, you've got God knows what else on the cameras, how do we clean these things off of it? What's the process? What do you use for that

Micah:

Squirt gun?

James Campbell:

Squirt gun.

Calver:

Yes, definitely.

James Campbell:

What are those things called?

Micah:

Water balloons. Super soakers.

James Campbell:

Yeah, super soakers. There you go. Which model should we get here?

Calver:

It's most powerful links

Micah:

Below

Calver:

The backpack and everything. Oh,

Micah:

We're not sponsored by Super Soaker.

Calver:

So when I was a technician and was out in the field every day I would keep kind of a bucket or a kit of cleaning supplies with me in my van to go to each site, whether it be for a service call or whatever. And in that kit, I'd always keep a big stack of microfiber towels like you use to wash your cars. Those are really, really good for lenses. You definitely want to make sure you're not using anything hard or that can potentially scratch the lenses in any way. That will definitely show up on your captured image very, very, very quickly. And for the outside of the camera too, definitely want to make sure you're taking care of that as well. So I would always keep WASP spray or bug spray with me when I go up there to do that. Sometimes they like to make nests in the camera housing or between the camera and the soffit or the gutters or wherever it's mounted.

So you want to make sure that you're taking care of all that. If there are any nests or anything up there while you're cleaning the cameras, go ahead and get rid of those. They have the potential to block your view with webs or whatever they create when they're flying around and just existing. So yeah, microfiber towels, cleaning solution, bug spray. Pretty much it really, I mean, yeah, for the outside of the camera, don't soak it or anything like that or directly spray it. The IP rating will help a little bit, but you don't want to get a hose and go a foot away from the camera and just trench it. But if you kind of missed it and then wipe it down, you be good.

James Campbell:

I think one of the key things that was a really great, all that kit and everything, clean microfiber cloth. When the scratches happen, if you have a dirty cloth and you're scratching it on, there's a little bit of dirt on there, can cause tons of damage like you said. So

Micah:

What about other things that you want to clean as far as maintaining your system? I, I'm thinking about using compressed

Gill Illescas:

Air and spraying out your switches and your headend, that

Micah:

Kind of stuff. Absolutely. Probably less frequently, but

Gill Illescas:

Still maybe annually. Say fans really get a lot of buildup if there's fans in the M V R and or switches. Yeah, so compressed air hitting those up is really good, to be honest.

James Campbell:

For sure. Yeah, that's another small but thing that can keep your N V R running

Gill Illescas:

Connectors. Connectors get corroded connectors get dirty connectors, get stuff in them that can get in the middle of the connection. That can happen a lot. So doing an actual check unplugging and checking out the connector and then plugging it back in, even checking the receptacle for the connector. It all depends on how in depth you want to get, but these are all places that can get corrosive or get dirt in it and affect the signal for sure.

Calver:

It could potentially all that dust or corrosion or whatever in between the connection could potentially damage ports. So I mean over time you could lose ports on your NVS and the ability to view as many cameras and potentially it could go past the port and even damage the NV R as a whole if it's too too dusty. Just really depends on the environment. If it's in a manufacturing environment, lots of dust and stuff, you're going to want to do that pretty frequently, I'd say maybe five times a year just to preserve the integrity of all your equipment, networking equipment recorders. As far as wireless equipment too, that's something we haven't really talked about, but we deploy a lot of wireless antennas and it's really important to make sure that those connections and ports and antennas themselves are clean as well, so they can function properly every aspect of your system, just a good once over every once in a while depending on the environment.

James Campbell:

The M V R and the dusting is really huge, and especially I remember we had a customer that was a wood chipping processing plant, and so that thing would you open it up and it's just all wood chips basically, and that's something that happens monthly. So they would have to come in and open it up, do the compressed air and get it out of there just to make sure

Gill Illescas:

That saw does. That's

James Campbell:

Crazy. Yeah, saw does, that's the word. And that kind

Micah:

Of circumstance, would it make sense to put

Gill Illescas:

Your

Micah:

Networking equipment in

Gill Illescas:

Some sort of

Micah:

Rated NEMA box?

James Campbell:

That's actually a good way of avoiding that to some degree.

Calver:

If costs allows, then highly recommend

Micah:

That. Yeah, it is more expensive. That's true. But depending on the environment, it might save you losing footage that's valuable.

James Campbell:

Yeah,

Calver:

Absolutely. Especially because most manufacturers don't really cover that stuff under their equipment warranties. I mean, I know we don't. So the more you can do to keep your system clean and everything functioning properly, the longer it's going to last and the less replacements you're going to have to potentially pay for.

James Campbell:

What about maintaining your software? That's a big for cybersecurity and for features and bugs, we have firmware updates on the cloud. How important is that to check that every quarter or so?

Calver:

Extremely important. Not every firmware update is going to have as much effect on the cameras. It's kind of hit or miss what bugs are potentially fixed with each firmware update, but you're never going to know until you update the firmware. So a lot of manufacturers will notify you, like when the firmware updates are available. I know on ours you can go to the, what was it, the network page or whatever, and search for available updates. Yeah,

James Campbell:

We'll have some guys on how you can do it. With our system, it's based on the clouds. All you have to do is hit the check button, it's going to check both the N V R and then we have another section to check your IP cameras. We'll check all your IP cameras. If there's an update, you just have to hit the update button and let it do it thing. It will reboot either the nbr or the cameras. So just keep that in mind. Make sure you're doing it during the time where being down for a couple minutes isn't going to be a major issue. But I think even to that point too with firmware updates is sometimes people update firmware and they kind of look around for brand new features and all this kind of stuff. It's like there's nothing really there, nothing very big apparent. And it's like, well, they may have updated something with the backend to make the cybersecurity better or something like that that's not quite visible to you at the end user stage. That's still extremely important. So I usually recommend people to check that at least We typically, depending on the models and everything like that, get about two to four firmware updates a year. So check quarterly and just update it when you can after you check quarterly.

Calver:

Good.

James Campbell:

Yeah. Anything else? Any final thoughts we have on maintaining your camera system and keeping it up and running as good as possible?

Calver:

No.

James Campbell:

No. Cool. I thought we covered the bases pretty well there. So if you have questions or comments or want to learn more, certainly reach out to us up here. And if you are interested in the system health check as well, maybe you know that, hey, I'd really like to go somebody to go through with a professional eye and check my camera system, reach out to us, we'll give you some details, what the cost is and everything. And if you want to do it one time like Micah mentioned or you want to do it on a schedule, we're happy to set that up and take kind of burden off of you to maintain that system. So that being said, yeah, reach out to us, comment on below. And until next time, we'll see you later.