Fault finder for security installers.

This tells you a lot: if it works locally, the recorder and the app are both fine. The failure is getting in from outside.

Two usual causes. Either the ports are not forwarded, or the broadband provider has put the line behind CGNAT — carrier-grade NAT — where the router has no public address to forward to. CGNAT is now standard on most 4G, 5G and a lot of full-fibre packages, and no amount of port forwarding will fix it.

Work up the chain rather than guessing. Check the recorder has an IP, gateway and DNS. A static IP set without a DNS server is the single most common cause across all four brands, because the recorder cannot resolve the cloud servers.

Then confirm the cloud service is enabled and reports Online rather than Offline or Connecting. Stuck on Connecting is almost always DNS.

You rarely need port forwarding any more, and on most modern connections you cannot use it anyway. Every one of these brands has a P2P cloud that covers the majority of installs.

Enable the cloud service on the recorder, set a verification code, then add the device by scanning the QR code on the recorder's screen. No router changes at all.

Passwords cannot be read back off the device on any of these brands — there is no back door, and anyone offering one is selling you something you should not install. All three manufacturers use the same principle: a code derived from the serial number and the current date, exchanged for a reset file.

Happens when cameras were activated separately, or came off a different job. The recorder shows the channel offline, or flags an authentication failure on that channel only.

These devices lock the source IP after repeated wrong attempts. It is a lockout, not damage, and it clears itself.

Almost always a signal-format mismatch rather than a dead camera. These recorders auto-detect the analogue format, but a channel can stick on the wrong one after an update and then refuse to move.

Check which camera you actually have before troubleshooting. A standard infrared camera is supposed to go monochrome at night — that is the IR working correctly. Only the full-colour ranges hold colour in darkness, and they do it with a white light, not IR.

Rolling bands under artificial light are a frame-rate mismatch with the mains. UK mains is 50Hz, so a camera left on the 60Hz NTSC setting will beat against fluorescent and LED lighting.

Infrared bouncing straight back into the lens. The usual culprits, in the order we find them: a spider web across the housing, a dirty or scratched dome bubble, a wall or soffit inside the first metre of view, or rain on the lens.

Classic voltage drop. The camera runs fine in daylight, then the infrared cuts in at dusk, current draw roughly doubles, and volt drop over a long or thin cable takes it below the working threshold.

It comes down to resolution, frame rate, compression and how many days the client wants. As a starting point for a quote: four 5MP cameras at 15fps on H.265+ recording continuously will use somewhere around 1TB a month.

Two things move that more than people expect. H.265+ roughly halves file size against plain H.264. And motion-triggered recording on a quiet site can cut it by two thirds — but on a busy road it saves nothing at all.

Check the storage menu first. A new drive shows as Uninitialised and records nothing until you initialise it — easy to miss, because everything else looks normal. If it is not listed at all, reseat the SATA and power leads.

Analogue — yes, freely. All of these run over coax at the same signal levels, and modern DVRs auto-detect TVI, CVI, AHD and CVBS per channel. A Dahua HDCVI camera on a Hikvision Turbo HD recorder is fine.

IP — yes, but with caveats. All four are ONVIF compliant so they will connect and record. What you lose is the manufacturer-specific layer: smart events, line crossing, face detection and audio often will not pass through ONVIF, and you configure the camera in its own web interface rather than through the recorder.

PoC — Power over Coax — sends power down the same coax as the video, so there is no separate power run. On a retrofit where the coax is already in the wall, it turns a rewire into a swap.

It needs a matching PoC recorder, and this is where installers get caught: PoC is not standardised between manufacturers. Hikvision PoC and Dahua PoC use different implementations. A Dahua PoC camera on a Hikvision PoC recorder will generally not power up, even though both say PoC on the box.

The app cannot talk to a Premier Elite panel on its own — the panel needs a communicator fitted and registered to the cloud. Missing that step is the most common reason a new install will not connect.

Check three things in order: a SmartCom, ComIP or ComWiFi is physically fitted and detected by the panel; the panel is registered on Texecom Cloud; and Texecom Connect is enabled in the panel's Wintex programming.

Ricochet is a mesh, not a star — every mains-powered device acts as a repeater and hops signal back to the panel. A device that reads poor is usually too far from its nearest hop rather than too far from the panel.

Check the signal strength in diagnostics after the mesh has settled, not immediately on learning the device in. It takes time to route.

Separate two things before troubleshooting: is the path down, or is the account wrong? A path fault means the communicator has lost its route out. An account fault means it is connecting but the ARC is rejecting it.

There is no code you can read back and no universal override. Recovery requires physical access to the panel with the lid off, which raises a tamper, and the documented procedure defaults the panel — you lose the programming and start again.

If you have a Wintex backup of the site, restoring it afterwards takes minutes. If you do not, budget for a full reprogram.

On a wired zone, a tamper that will not clear is nearly always the end-of-line resistor value or wiring configuration not matching what the panel is programmed for. Check the zone's configured type against what is physically installed before chasing the cable.

On Ricochet wireless, a persistent tamper usually means the device is not seated fully on its backplate — the tamper switch needs firm contact and a slightly bowed backplate on an uneven wall is enough to hold it open.