CCTV Installed At Clarence Court Hotel

In order to provide better security for guests and the hotel as a whole, The Clarence Court hotel commissioned Cheltenham Computer Specialists to install some of the lastest CCTV cameras available on the market.

7 internal CCTV cameras with High Definition wide angle lenses, motion detection and night vision were installed to cover strategic points around the hotel. Placing the cameras was made easy because the power for the cameras is sent down the same cable as the data. This allowed for easy positioning of the cameras and did not restrict the cameras to locations where there was a power supply.

All the CCTV camera cables were fed back to the rack cabinet into which was installed a PoE (Power Over Ethernet) auto-sensing switch. Each cable was connected to one of the ports and power was then distributed to each camera.

Each camera can be manually adjusted to suit the coverage needed. The lens can be rotated 180 degrees and up and down by roughly 40 degrees but the wide angle of each lens means even small offices can be well covered.

The cameras were then named and added to a software package which was installed on one of the office's Windows PCs. It was from the software "Control Panel" that we set up when the recording would take place.

The options for recording were: Continuously, on Motion Detection or by a schedule. Motion detection also allowed for "hot spots" to be configured. Hot Spots allow for an room to be covered by the cameras but only start recording if someone breaks in through the window. Therefore, you mark the window as a "hot spot" and the camera ignores people walking around the rest of the room. It's a very simple and effective system.

Rather than clog up the office PC with large amounts of recordings, we attached a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device and from within the Control Panel we pointed all the recordings to the NAS freeing up the Office PC to act as just the controller.

The next step was to provide the owners remote access to the cameras and recordings. This allowed them to view the cameras in "real time" via a mobile phone, iPad or through a web browser from any location where they had Internet access or 3g / 4g coverage.

The Cheltenham based hotel is now covered by CCTV operating 24 / 7 and with the ability to look back at recordings for a given period of time.

Cheltenham CCTV Services

We have been asked on many occasion whether we install CCTV cameras for Cheltenham hotels, businesses and home owners as well as the surrounding areas and so we spent some time looking at the CCTV camera market and how they could be best used and what would best suit our expertise as IT Professionals and we settled on HikVision due to their good name, reliability and ease of use..

We now offer CCTV in Cheltenhamfor hotels, businesses, care homes, serviced apartments and home owners; to name just a few.

The CCTV system we use is not locked into licenses or the number of cameras you use - unlike many other CCTV camera systems.

Our CCTV System Of Choice

Our Cheltenham CCTV service uses cameras suitable for indoor and outdoor use and can work during the day and night.

The cameras are High Definition and can record at full HD or at lower resolutions to save on storage space.

Cameras can be viewed from a local PC or via a remote access service that can be used on a PC, iPad or Phone. This means you can either view a live view of the cameras or look at recordings from anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection or 3g / 4g connection.

There is no real limit to the number of cameras that can be used. We've seen systems running 150 cameras.

Cheltenham CCTV Recording Devices 

You can record your CCTV to an NVR device of your choosing although a specialised device by the same manufacturer is available to make setup even easier. However, the device has a small hard drive and is only suitable for home users with just a few cameras.

Larger CCTV environments will want to record far more data and therefore a larger capacity device will be needed and we choose to install a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) such as a Synology.

A NAS allows for a far greater CCTV storage capacity and will allow you to keep many days worth of recordings although the higher the resolution, the greater the file size and this has a knock-on effect to storage capacity and so on.

How Can The CCTV Cameras Be Configured ?

Cameras can be wall or ceiling mounted and can be manually rotated 180 degrees left or right. You can also manually tilt the lens up or down in order to get the best coverage but with wide angled lenses such as these, there should be no problem getting the coverage required.

The CCTV cameras can be used during the day or night and come with full infrared capability.

Recordings come in three possible modes:

1. Continual recording
2. Scheduled recording - only record during set times of the day or night
3. Motion detection recording - Only record when motion is detected

It is also possible to determine how long the recording continues. You can set the camera to keep recording for any period of time you choose once motion has been detected.

If you have a door with a cat flap you want to cover but want to avoid having the cat trigger the motion sensor, you can, from the control panel, draw out a motion zone which does not cover the cat flap, therefore, when the cat goes in and out of the flap, the recording does not get triggered, but should someone open the door, it will trigger and the recording will begin.