bigcatbobcat

this guy is bad, but not that bad. I would save that last quote for the nice little Korean lady we put a system for in a wig shop who has called 3-4 times complaining "we aint got ah no picture" I finally went out there to see what was up and her husband says "well, I come in here this morning like usual and hit the button to turn it on and it don't show no pictures" I said "Which button? Not the power button on the DVR?" "Yep, right there, that button." Sure enough, it was the DVR power and they turned it off every night when the last person went home. The "no picture" issue was the monitor not coming back from sleep mode. I checked their recordings and they're closed on Sundays and sure enough nothing recorded ever on a sunday. I said to him "You realize, if you turn it off when you go home at 6 and someone breaks in at 8, or even 6:05 for that matter, you don't have any pictures right?" "Well, we got them IR cameras right?" WHAT?! We put a big sticker on their DVR that said "DO NOT TOUCH." I wouldn't have minded except after I explained to him not to touch it, he explained, or said he explained to his wife and everyone else not to touch it, 2 days later "We ain't got ah no picture-ah" and I drove the 160 mile round trip and they didn't want to pay me for a service call eventhough I told them that if there was nothing wrong with the unit or it wasn't a warranty issue or whatever they'd have to pay and they agreed before I left. So we ended that conversation with "You know my other store? You do that one too, ok?" I said "Umm, we'll see." Depends on how desperate I am for business when our next appointment at the new store is.

This is a good question, I think his pc? Could you ever take a DVR hdd and hook it up to your pc and just import the files? I know my laptop has some SATA connection on it. In the words of a little guy on an airplane one time "How dis woooooorrrk?"

I have a customer, well, a guy I sold something to that I won't sell to again, and he's upgrading his dvr from an 8Ch to a 16Ch. He won't pay for a new hard drive "Well, can't you take the one out of the 8 and put it in the 16?" Yeah, of course I can but the 16 is different from the 8 and all of your images will be lost when the 16 gets the hard drive out of the 8 it will re-format it. "Well, caynt (that's how he talks) caynt ewe just back it up fir me?" It would take hours to back up each hour block for each channel and I don't want to do that and he won't do it. Is there a way to back up the entire hard drive? There are tons of back-up options for PC's of course, but I haven't found a good way to do it with a DVR. As always, help is appreciated.

Something I didn't think of in my original post, just thought of it when I was emptying my pockets, SCREWS! I use dry wall screws where ever I can, especially in ceiling tiles and of course, drywall but in other things like wood and stuff, they've got deep threads which I like. But you'll need an assortment, and lengths vary as well. I never ever use the anchors or screws that come with the cameras, just think the drywall screws usually work perfectly. Tapcons, dry wall screws, sheetmetal screws are the main ones.

Yeah Johnny, I was in the same boat as you about a year ago. I learn by doing. If you're good at troubleshooting, thinking things through rationally and whatnot, definitely just do your best and clean up along the way and keep track of "Oh man, won't do that again" or "Man, there must be a tool for this" or "That worked out well, I'll try that again." Tools, I've found, you just need a cordless drill, something to hold your spool of cable, fish sticks, electrical tape (I LOVE ELECTRICAL TAPE), the usual handy man type tools, hand tools and whatnot. When you think about it, the installs are easy, it's the building you're putting them in that are often the issue, so you need tools and stuff to deal with that. Our largest job that I took on by myself was a car dealership in a renovated old house that has some serious additions and the only thing I didn't have were assorted wood screws and whatnot. You know crimpers, strippers and all those specialty tools for this business, but like I said, making our stuff go in weird places is where you get creative. As for pay, you make whatever you think is fair and what will get your name out there but not so low that you can't turn a profit. In our case, we thought we'd sell these jobs and have installers come in. Pro guys who do banks and the CCTV is a side deal. Well, we got in a negotiation with a guy in a C-Store and figured we'd given away all our profit if we were going to pay an installer. So, we figured it out and did it ourselves. It wasn't pretty, an 8 camera system shouldnt take 2 guys 3 days to do but we did it, we got great pictures too (did i mention we used premade cable back then?). So we started to think of our time as free, and that's simply not the case. The Way I'd like to price out jobs, is a slight mark up on the equipment and then what we'd be charged by the contractors we used in the beginning, which was $75 a camera and $0.25/foot for cable. I don't know how they came up with those numbers and not hourly, but that's what they charge. We now bang out 8 camera systems in about 5-6 hours...thank goodness. I feel like I could go on and on about it, because it's so far outside of what I thought I'd be doing and I'm kind proud of myself for learning it.

Took the camera off the wall, it instantly stopped. We put them on PVC outdoor J-Boxes, so they have the gasket between the camera and the box, they're indoors so not too worried about water getting on the connections any so we didn't completely seal the boxes, like leaving a gap and the pictures are perfect. Must be some grounding issue or something in the steel walls of the building.

Yeah, thanks soundy. I'm just going to have to go out there and try things. The only issue is the owner follows me around whenever I'm doing anything like a lost puppy asking questions and thinking of places I can move the cameras he has to and adjusting the ones we've adjusted 20-30 times. Anyway, I'll test it and reply here once we find a solution.

The DVR will only record 704x576 (TV PAL) 704x480 (TV NTSC) or around what? 520 TVL. I am still unclear if the live view on the DVR will be at whatever TVL the camera is capable of. If you're live viewing, monitoring constantly these cameras, the higher TVL would be advantageous but only if you're connected to a high resolution monitor directly. I always think of it like a bottle neck or a choke, or like in nascar a restrictor plate. Whatever the lowest resolution on a system is would generally be as high as you should go with all parts of the system. Why push 700 TVL if your DVR will only record 520 lines of it?

I meant to update, it does it all the time now. I don't know if they've added any more appliances out there that pull significant power. The issue I'm having is that I've sort of resigned myself to saying "Ok we have to put it in conduit." and I don't want to bear that cost and I'm sure the customer won't either, I had a hard enough time getting him to pay for the system.

Yeah, it helped a little but didn't clear it up. I'm not sure what else to do here. It is a metal building, metal housings, metal screws of course, might put them on a plastic box? I have no idea...

What about supplying the power locally. Currently have the usual siamese cable coming from the main building, approx 175 feet away. If we use a power supply out in the garage would that eliminate the issues?

If it works localy, but not remotely, it is usually a port forwarding issue on the router. If it works for a while remotely but stops working remotely AND still works locally, then the router probably lost its configuration OR the IP address of the DVR moved, so the router can't forward to it anymore OR the router has a more complex configuration on port forwarding - like time of day or total bandwith allowed or some such thing. Does the router limit the bandwidth allowed? Say we take the dvrs and put it on a separate router and then all the computers on another one? Or is the cable modem/TWC (the isp) the bandwidth limiting agent, for lack of a better term?

Had the same issue, when you say it's a router problem, whats the fix?

I'm back on this job. Customer was OK with temporary interference and actually started using a different compressor but the cameras have gone out. We replaced the cameras and the issue immediately came back. Is placing the cable in metal conduit my only option?

I've got an installation, 16 cameras, 2 out in a detached garage. It's 160 feet away from the DVR. We noticed there are waves or just a general distortion and thought it was the 277v conduit in the garage that was in the same area (sometimes touching) our cable. Then the owner said "No I think it's your power supply" It wasn't. So we figured it out. I was messing with it and talking to my partner on the phone, as I separated the cable from the conduit, he noticed every time he heard a noise the picture began to distort. It turns out it was the air compressor they used to fill tires or whatever. I switched the outlet that was plugged into, same issue. I talked to our most experienced installer and he said, "Yep, harmonic distortion." He knew what it was but didn't have much of an answer for how to fix it. What do you guys think? I could have sworn I saw there was something you could do to even out the picture, some sort of accessory or something? Any help is appreciated.