Home systems
For most households, a full service once a year is reasonable — checking camera focus and positioning, cleaning lenses (surprisingly impactful on image quality), confirming recordings are actually being saved, and testing remote access still works after any router or ISP changes.
Between annual services, a five-minute check of your own is worth doing every few months: open the app, confirm each camera is still online, and glance at a recent clip to make sure image quality hasn't degraded.
Business systems
For shops, offices and commercial premises, we'd generally recommend checking in every 3–6 months rather than annually — partly because more is riding on the footage being usable as evidence if it's ever needed, and partly because business premises tend to have more cameras covering more ground, so there's simply more that can go quietly wrong.
Warning signs a service call is overdue
- Night-time footage looking noticeably grainier or darker than it used to
- The recorder's storage filling up faster than expected (often a sign a drive is starting to fail)
- Remote viewing occasionally dropping out or needing frequent reconnection
- Any camera that's been knocked, or visibly pointing somewhere slightly different than it used to
Why this matters more than it seems
The most common repair call-out we get isn't a dramatic failure — it's someone discovering, after something's happened, that their system stopped recording weeks earlier and nobody noticed. A cheap annual check genuinely prevents this. It's the same logic as an annual boiler service: unglamorous, easy to skip, and the one time you actually need it to have been done is exactly when skipping it costs you.