A case study of CCTV at London’s only purpose-built centre for adult education, to protect their student lounges from vandalism and theft.
CityLit, dating from 1919, moved to Covent Garden in 2005. It offers over 5,000 courses to more than 30,000 students a year. The eight storey building is undergoing major improvement work. Opportunistic thieves had used crowbars to force open and steal money from vending machines, three times in one year, causing damage, besides the repair costs and loss of revenue to the institution.
CityLit sought CCTV cameras in five student lounges, each on different floors. They selected the Kent-based installer Secure Engineering’s idea of a stand-alone IP system, rather than integrating it into an existing analogue system. This allowed for additional cameras to be added, the installers say.
Systems Design Manager for the installer Chris Owen designed the IP system using vandal resistant 1.3 megapixel CCTV cameras with infrared lighting by night, to allow for picture quality in all light conditions. These discreet domes link via a network to an eight-port network video recorder (NVR). By using Power Over Ethernet (POE) engineers were able to power all of the cameras from the NVR with a single CAT5 cable running to each one. This reduced the installation costs,the installer adds, by removing the need for a mains power supply at each camera position.
Richard Kelly, CityLit’s Facilities and Procurement Officer said: ‘Secure Engineers take everything thrown at them. They have good communication skills and know what they are doing. When you’ve been in the industry a while, you don’t want to mess around. You want people that you can rely on to get the job done. That’s why we use Secure Engineering.’
Visit : www.secureeng.co.uk.
