Work at a local country park.

This week I carried out a job for a local country park. The initial job was to replace the DVR. When I went to look at the job my first job was to check that all the pictures were present and, unfortunately found all the pictures missing. It was discovered that some recent works carried out had severed the cables and broken the ducting.
I managed to carry out repairs to all the cables and restore pictures from the cameras and installed a replacement DVR.
Once the cameras were properly visible it could be seen that the cameras were in need of a little TLC. One of the static cameras had a picture of sorts but just looked like the iris was stuck in its fully open position. The PTZ camera was quite difficult to distinguish any picture on.
Working at the static camera first, I opened the housing to find a large pool of water on the inside and the heater cable had been purposely cut! I checked the heater’s resistance which showed that it was fine, measured the current drawn by the camera, and with a little ohms law worked out the total current draw would be a little under 0.9A. So I reconnected the heater (after drying out the housing first!) and waited a few minutes to check it all worked.
While at the pole, I removed the PTZ dome cover and emptied out all the dead insects before giving it a good clean. I carried out a minor repair to the cable joint in the column base and then returned to the control room to check the pictures. All looked good.
My final little job was to integrate the PTZ keyboard into the system. There were no cables attached to it and I was informed by the customer that they’d never seen it working. A small 1A power supply was installed to supply the power, and a new cable made up and connected into the rear of the keyboard. The other end got connected into an alarm interface unit and the relevant DIP switches set for terminations and data rate, and happily it all worked.
A little bit of maintenance goes a long way to making sure your system is working at its best, it’s well worth the time and effort and may prove useful in the future should you be unfortunate enough to have to provide evidence of some wrong doing!
A couple of days later I returned to re-site a camera.
I can honestly say that the customer and all it’s staff were very pleasant and helpful, and it was a pleasure working for them. I hope I get the opportunity to carry out work for them again in the future.