Hardwick Hall, near Sedgefield, County Durham, which stages the Oyster and Lobster Festivals, is also hosting open air concerts and art events. This year, such bands as Echo & the Bunnymen as well as Primal Scream are due to perform. The managers at the Hall sought new CCTV for managing event crowds. The Hall managing director John Adamson says: “We’ve had CCTV for many years but the pictures were of too poor a quality to be appropriate for the numbers of people we are looking after now. We needed picture quality as good, if not better than you get on your TV at home. The problem we were faced with was that many state of the art CCTV systems need digital Cat 6 cabling which is very costly and hugely disruptive to install in a busy hotel environment like ours.”
He had a chance conversation with Gary Trotter of Sunderland-based CCTV installer Hadrian Technology, who was attending Mr Adamson’s newly completed spa facility at Ramside Hall. Hadrian have re-used well over a kilometre of old co-axial cables by converting digital camera signals and allowing them to run over previously installed networks. This avoided the need to rip up floor boards and hack off plaster to find the route of previously installed cabling.
The system can also run at the same time as the original analogue camera installation meaning that businesses can now phase the upgrading of their systems.
Gary Trotter, general manager at Hadrian Technology, is pictured. He said: “There are thousands of buildings and properties like Hardwick Hall where there is a need to upgrade CCTV systems. However, till now there has been no solution without incurring major cost and the disruption associated with ripping out old analog cabling and installing new Cat 6 networks. When we visited Hardwick Hall it was immediately apparent that to replace the existing19 camera system and add another 29 high spec cameras with minimal inconvenience, we would have to make use of existing cabling, despite the normal incompatibility issues.
“By using the new AHD technology developed with our partners Concept Pro, we were also able to halve the time taken to complete the job and saved the client well over ten thousand pounds.”
