Feedback Requested On A Price Quote I Am Going To Give A Customer

UD1,

Remove existing, terminate Cat5e, install new camera and land cabling into patch panel I would say that 1 hour each is a accurate number. The 1/2 hour for the cameras that are 20' up I think would be low, it takes time to get a lift on site and setup and going. For myself I wouldn't go less than 1 hour to move each camera.

Are you programming or otherwise setting up the cameras, or just terminating and mounting them?

How about the NVR/NAS/VMS? Does this price include setting that up?

Are you just asking about the camera swap labor, because there is nothing in your post about NVR setup, config, adjusting settings of new cameras and so forth.

It's hard to say if your estimate is accurate without knowing how close all the cameras are to each other. You could easily have 10 minutes of just moving/setting the ladder (or lift), in between each camera. Or, if they're all close and you have a motorized lift your camera to camera "travel time" could be 45 seconds or less.

It's really hard to say, and I don't do a lot of install quoting, but the prices seem low to me. Partly because of the high odds (IMO) that you wind up encountering issues with the existing cabling somewhere along the way and then end up having to deal with that on the fly.

If you think at least 12 of the camera moves are going to be quick and easy, then you're probably OK, the extra time you pick up on those would buffer any unforeseen setbacks on some of the more difficult ones.

too many variables to be accurate, but you need to account for a certain amount of fluff in there if thats not your wire to start with. make sure to include programming, setup, remote connection and training time, and that wire drop is going to take you longer than half an hour... my techs would probably spend half an hour each just getting to it and looking at it to devise a plan. dont forget the time to reaim and focus when the client says... can we move this view a tinge to the right?

UD1,

Are you planning to use a network cable tester to verify the cable before you do any other work?

IPVM provides a cable testing guide.

Maybe you have already accounted for the cable testing time, or specified a per-hour rate for that.

The reason I ask is that I have been called in to troubleshoot projects where CAT5e cable was used with video baluns for analog cameras, and the cable was reused when IP cameras were installed (and encoders put in place for some of the newer analog cameras).

The problem was that some of the cameras were not getting all of their video through.

The Technical Details

The trouble turned out to be that some of the CAT5e cable runs were poorly installed and could not support more than 10 Mbps. On a 1 gigabit network, the network connection was automatically being negotiated down to 100 Mbps or even 10 Mbps.

About a year ago I came across this chart:

10 mbps = 1.25 megabytes per second
100 mbps = 12.5 megabytes per second
1000 mbps (1 Gbps) = 125 megabytes per second

With IP cameras you will be sending more (or maybe very much more) video data across the cables, depending upon how many megapixels the camera image is. Although I have seen installations where some of the cable runs would only support 100 Mbps connections, since CAT5e cable is designed for 1 Gbps, doing that means you are re-using a cable that has been incorrectly installed, and could further deteriorate over time.

The Customer

It can be important to explain to the customer why existing cable may not be up to snuff. They don't know about any of the networking details, or that megapixel cameras mean a lot more video data. Otherwise they can find it suspicious that cable which was working for the cameras they have now, won't necessarily work for the new cameras.

In the interest of time (and money), 110 blocks are Cat 5 rated- use a C4 to RJ 45 adapter and let'er rip.