These are the situations Ditmas Park homeowners, condo owners, co-op boards, tenants and shopkeepers describe when they call us about their cameras. Each is answered in full here and not repeated in the FAQ further down.
Big houses and long runs
Our house sits well back from the sidewalk. The porch camera shows the whole front garden, but anyone on the sidewalk is too small to recognize. Is that a repair, or the wrong camera?
Usually it is the wrong lens for the job rather than a broken camera. Most porch cameras have a wide lens that takes in everything from the steps to the street, which makes a person at the far end of a deep front garden only a few dozen pixels tall. Recognizing a face needs the person to fill much more of the frame. There are three ways to fix it. A camera with a zoom lens can be set narrower so it covers the front walk and the gate. A second camera can watch the gate or the steps closely while the wide one keeps the overview. Or the existing camera can be moved to a spot closer to where people actually walk. We look at the recording, measure the distance and tell you which works on your house, and if a replacement camera is needed it is priced as an outdoor camera at $250 to $600 on our Brooklyn list.
Two of our porch cameras get their power from plug-in boxes on a shelf in the attic, and every few months one dies until somebody climbs up and plugs it back in. What is going on up there?
A plug-in power adapter in an attic lives a hard life. In summer an attic in an old frame house can get far hotter than the adapter was built for, and in winter it gets cold and damp, so adapters there wear out early, work loose in their outlets, or sit on a power strip that someone switches off with the attic light. The pattern you describe, a camera that comes back when the adapter is replugged, points to a loose plug, a failing adapter or an outlet that is losing contact. We test each adapter under load, check the outlet and strip, and usually replace the attic adapters with a single central power supply or move the cameras onto a PoE switch near the recorder, so nothing in the attic has to be touched again. Power supply repair runs $150 to $400 on our Brooklyn list.
Two of our cameras show "video loss" on the recorder only at night. In daylight they're fine. Why would a camera stop at dark?
The usual cause is power, not the camera. When the light drops, a camera turns on its infrared lights, and those draw noticeably more power than the camera needs by day. If the power supply is weak, shared with too many cameras, or at the end of a long thin cable, the voltage at the camera sags when the infrared comes on and the camera restarts or drops its picture, then recovers at dawn. It is common on big houses, where the farthest cameras are on the longest runs. We measure the voltage at the camera after dark, then fix the supply or the run. That is often a power supply repair at $150 to $400 or a reterminated connector at $150 to $350, not a new camera.
We have ten cameras on the house but the recorder only shows eight. The other two are lit up and look fine. Are they recording anywhere?
Probably not. Every recorder has a fixed number of channels, and some also limit how much video they can take in at once. If an installer added cameras over the years until there were more cameras than channels, or replaced older cameras with higher-resolution ones that the recorder cannot handle, the extra cameras may be powered and working but not recorded. We check the recorder's channel count and incoming bandwidth, find where the two cameras are wired, and tell you the options: a recorder with more channels, lower settings on some cameras so they fit, or a small second recorder. A recorder replacement with the cameras set up again runs $700 to $1,500 on our Brooklyn list, and a settings change with no part is covered within the service call.
After a leak, our electrician rewired most of the house. The recorder powers up, but four cameras have been dark since. What did the rewiring likely change?
Most often the power that fed those cameras. An electrician replacing old wiring may remove or move the outlet where a central power box or a PoE switch was plugged in, put it on a circuit controlled by a wall switch, or leave a camera cable disconnected at a junction that was opened during the work. Sometimes a camera cable was cut where new electrical cable went through the same hole. Because four cameras failed together, the first suspect is a shared power box or switch that lost its outlet, and that is a quick fix once found. We start at the recorder and follow those four runs to wherever they pass through the rewired areas. We do not do electrical work; if an outlet is dead, your electrician restores it and we finish the repair.
We bought our house with cameras on it, and the seller didn't leave the recorder or say where it is. Is there a way to find it?
Usually, yes, because the cables have to end somewhere. In big old houses the recorder may be on a cellar shelf behind storage, in a hall or bedroom closet, in the attic, under a desk or even inside a cabinet with a router. We follow the camera cables from the outside, use a tone generator from the camera end to find which bundle they join, and check the network for any device that looks like a recorder. If the seller took the recorder with them, the cameras and their cables usually stay useful, and a replacement recorder can be fitted to them. If the recorder is there but locked to the seller's account, many brands have a reset process that needs proof of ownership, and we tell you which kind you have before we start.
The new historic districts
Our block is now inside the Ditmas Park West Historic District. The porch-post camera died, and we would like the new one on the plain siding beside the door instead. Is moving it different from replacing it?
Yes. Under the Landmarks Preservation Commission's Permit Guidebook, ordinary repair and in-kind replacement of a camera does not need a permit, so putting a new camera on the same post in the same spot is maintenance. Moving it to a new location on the front of the house is new work, and the guidebook sets out what staff can approve: cameras well spaced, attached to plain wood, masonry or metalwork rather than decorative surfaces, and no more than about ten inches of visible conduit. A camera on plain siding beside the door is the kind of position the guidebook favors, but it still needs an application. We can replace the camera in its current spot now, so you are covered, and supply the cut sheet and photos you need if you apply to move it.
Footage, neighbors and the police
A neighbor down the block asked for our footage after their car was broken into overnight. How do we give them the clip without giving them access to our cameras?
Export the clip; never share the login. On most recorders you can pick the camera and time window, save that stretch to a USB stick in the recorder's own format and in a common video format, and hand over the file. That gives your neighbor, and the police if your neighbor reports it, exactly the minutes they need and nothing else about your house. If you are not sure how to export on your recorder, or the clip has to come off a recorder you would rather nobody restarted, we can do it on a visit and note the recorder's clock against real time. If you would like to share more regularly, a view-only account limited to one camera is possible on many systems, but a file is the safer default.
Our camera caught someone taking a package from the porch in daylight, but the clip jumps from frame to frame, so you never see a clear moment. Why is it so choppy?
That is usually the recording settings, not a fault. Many systems record at a low frame rate to save drive space, or record the camera's low-quality second stream instead of the main one, and some only start full recording after motion is detected. A person moving quickly across a porch may appear in only a few frames, none of them sharp. We check each camera's frame rate, recording stream and bitrate against the drive's size, then set the porch and door cameras to record smoothly at full quality while less important cameras keep lighter settings. Where the drive is too small to hold that much video for a sensible number of days, we tell you what a larger one would add.
Ocean Avenue and Westminster Road buildings
In our six-story building, every camera on the east stairs went dark at the same moment, while the lobby and the west stairs kept working. Where would the problem be?
Something those cameras share. In larger buildings the cameras on one stair line or riser are often fed by their own power box, or connected to a small switch in a closet partway up the building, before a single cable carries them down to the recorder. When that box, switch or cable fails, every camera on that line goes dark together while the rest of the building stays on. We find where the east-stair cameras come together, test the power and the link there, and work back to the recorder. In most cases it is a power supply at $150 to $400 or a switch port or connector at $150 to $350, and the stair cameras themselves are fine.
Cortelyou Road and Newkirk Plaza businesses
Our Newkirk Plaza store has a street-facing camera from the Safe Shopper program, and it has been dark for a while. Who is responsible for repairing it, and can any company work on it?
When those cameras were installed in 2017, Bklyner reported that businesses were responsible for "maintenance, upkeep, repair, and registration," so the repair is the store's to arrange. It is a security camera like any other, and any licensed company can repair it. We find which recorder it feeds, often the store's own recorder in the back or a separate small one, test the camera, its cable and its power, and fix what failed. If it is still registered with the NYPD's camera program, nothing about the registration changes when the camera is repaired, but check that the recorder's clock is correct so footage you share lines up with real time.
Our Cortelyou Road cafe's cameras freeze and drop out of the app on busy weekend evenings, when the place is full. Are the cameras failing?
Probably not. The timing points to the network. Many cafes and restaurants run their cameras, card terminals, music and guest Wi-Fi on one router, and when a full room of customers streams video on the guest network, the cameras' traffic gets squeezed. Network cameras can then stall or drop from the recorder, and remote viewing on the app freezes. We check how the cameras, the recorder and the guest network are connected, then put the cameras on their own switch or their own part of the network so customers' phones cannot crowd them out. That is usually settings and a switch port, priced within our $150 to $350 range for a port or connector job, rather than new cameras.
