Should a CCTV Installer or an Electrician Fit Your Cameras?

Where each trade genuinely fits

• Electrician fits well: power provision, container/consumer unit work, running cable on a new build alongside other services to a specialist's design
• Specialist's territory: camera placement design (identification vs overview, lens choices, night performance), recorder/storage engineering, network configuration and hardening, app/remote setup, analytics tuning, GDPR signage/retention, commissioning documentation
• The hybrid that works on new builds: electrician first-fixes Cat6 to the specialist's drawing; specialist second-fixes cameras and commissions — cost-efficient and common in our projects
• Where it goes wrong: 'my electrician fitted four cameras' jobs that record 7 days at the wrong angles with the default password — we re-engineer these weekly

The differences you can't see on day one

Two installations can look identical on the wall and behave nothing alike when tested by events: one identifies a face at the gate at night, holds 31 days, alerts only on people, and exports a police-ready clip in two minutes; the other shows a silhouette, overwrote the incident after nine days, pings every headlight and is reachable from the open internet with admin/12345. The gap is design and configuration — the speciality. Certification matters for the same reason it does in alarms: SSAIB/NSI-certificated security firms are independently audited on exactly these practices, and your insurer recognises their paperwork (verify any firm — including us, registration 13629 — on the public registers).

Cost comparison, honestly

Day-rate maths tempts: an electrician at £250–£350/day hanging supplied cameras can undercut a specialist quote noticeably. Like-for-like it narrows fast — specialist quotes include the design time, configuration, commissioning, documentation and warranty the day-rate excludes, and equipment supplied at trade often offsets margin. Where budgets are tight, the efficient split is the one above (sparks pull cable to our drawing); where quotes are compared, use our 10-point quote checklist so 'cheaper' is measured against the same deliverables. The reliably expensive option is the rework: paying twice because coverage, storage or security was nobody's responsibility the first time.