CCTV
CCTV maintenance and repair in Kent
Servicing, fault finding and repair for CCTV across Kent, on our own installations and on systems fitted by somebody else. Most calls we get are from people who found out their system was not working at the worst possible moment.
- Free estimates
- Insurance work undertaken
- Domestic & commercial
The failure nobody notices until it matters
CCTV fails quietly. Unlike an alarm, which announces a fault on the keypad, a camera system can degrade for months while continuing to show a picture on the monitor. The recorder can be full, the retention can have dropped to two days, a camera can have been knocked out of alignment by a hedge trimmer, and none of it is obvious until somebody actually needs footage of a specific hour on a specific day.
That is why the calls come in the order they do. The most common reason we are asked to look at a system for the first time is that an incident has happened and the footage either is not there or is not usable. At that point the system has already failed at the only job it had, and no repair recovers the recording that was never made.
What actually goes wrong
The faults are boringly consistent, which is the good news, because it means a scheduled check catches almost all of them.
- Hard drive failure in the recorder, which is a wear part and does not last forever
- Retention silently dropping as cameras are added, so 30 days quietly becomes 5
- Dirty or fogged lenses and domes, which destroys night performance long before it affects the daytime picture
- Infrared illuminators failing, so a camera that looks fine by day sees nothing after dark
- Cameras knocked, drooped or overgrown, covering a hedge instead of the driveway
- Water ingress at connections, usually where a cable was terminated outdoors without a proper gland
- Remote viewing that stopped working after a router or broadband change and was never restored
A service visit, and what is actually checked
A proper visit is more than confirming the monitor shows pictures. We check and clean every camera, confirm focus and field of view against what the camera is supposed to be covering, test night performance rather than assuming it, check the recorder's drive health and actual retention period, verify that recordings can be exported and played back, and confirm remote viewing works from outside the building rather than from the local network.
That export check is the one most often skipped and the one that matters most. A system that records perfectly but cannot produce a file anybody else can open has not given you evidence, it has given you a screen.
Systems we did not install
We take on other installers' systems and it is a large part of this work. Property changes hands, the original company folds or stops returning calls, or the person who knew the passwords has left.
The usual obstacles are administrative rather than technical, meaning nobody has the admin credentials for the recorder. That is often recoverable. Where equipment is genuinely obsolete we will say so, and where it is perfectly serviceable and just needs setting up properly we will say that instead, which is more often the case than the industry generally admits.
Retention, privacy and keeping it defensible
If a camera covers anything beyond your own boundary, data protection duties come with it, and they are more often a problem with a neighbour than with a regulator. Keeping footage for far longer than you have a reason to is the common mistake, and so is keeping it for so little time that an incident noticed a fortnight later has already been overwritten.
Part of a service visit is confirming the retention period is what you think it is and that it is a defensible length for the reason the system exists. It is a five minute check that gets missed on almost every system we take over.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
How often should CCTV be serviced?
Once a year suits most domestic and small commercial systems, and it is enough to catch the drive, retention and night-performance problems before they matter. Larger sites, anywhere with a lot of cameras, or systems where footage is genuinely relied on for insurance or evidence are better on twice a year. If your system is more than five years old and has never been looked at, that first visit is worth booking regardless of the interval you settle on.
Will you work on a system another company installed?
Yes, and it is most of what we do on maintenance. The main thing that decides how straightforward it is turns out to be paperwork rather than hardware, namely whether anyone still has the admin login for the recorder. Bring whatever documentation exists and we will work from there. Where credentials are genuinely lost there is usually still a route, and we will tell you honestly if there is not.
My cameras record but the picture is useless at night. Can that be fixed?
Usually, and it is rarely the camera. Night performance is destroyed most often by a dirty or scratched dome, by an infrared illuminator that has failed, or by a camera pointed at a light source that is blinding it. All three are fixable without replacing anything. Where it genuinely is the camera, it is normally an older unit being asked to work in a spot with no ambient light at all, and we will tell you what would actually cover it.
How long should CCTV footage be kept?
Long enough to be useful and no longer than you can justify. For most homes and small businesses somewhere around 30 days is a sensible balance, because incidents are often noticed days rather than hours later. What matters is that the period is deliberate rather than whatever the recorder happened to default to, and that it is genuinely what the system is doing. We check the real figure on a service visit, which is often not the figure the owner expects.
Do you cover emergency call-outs?
We work Monday to Saturday, 9 to 5, and we will get to urgent faults as quickly as we can within that. We do not advertise a 24 hour call-out, because we do not run one and would rather say so than have you find out when you need it.
Free estimates
Want a free estimate in Kent?
No up-selling, just simple honest advice. Domestic and commercial work across Aylesford, Maidstone, Medway, Sittingbourne, Gravesend, Canterbury, Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks, Dartford, Bromley.