What did you all do before cameras?

[bert79]

I know there are some operators on this forum who have been in the business for a long time. I'm just curious to know how did you do it without a camera system to monitor your site(s). Being fairly new to the car wash world I just don't know how you all did it. We have cameras of course but I can't help but feel admiration for those of you who did it for years without.

 

[mjwalsh]

To answer ... it was a bit harder from 1968- 1982. Gathering conclusive evidence on various perps was definitely more difficult but not impossible. I am now more concerned about how law enforcement & DAs interpret etc .... with the camera evidence than it used to be in the past. That probably varies by the current local situation & the size of the city???

We have had some(4) recording cameras since 1982. That was back in the "tube" days where it was extremely expensive to own & maintain.

I was on with tech support for the latest generation more commercial duty Dell Sonicwall router that we just upgraded to. The techie gave me a sense that the router settings along with the quality of a specific router &/or ethernet switch could be helpful. That could possibly apply for those of us who choose to go down the route of a large number of POE cameras (hooked to a NVR vs a DVR). It seems that all camera systems have their trade off issues ... including total cost of ownership.

 

[STXCW]

Before
1) had more down time
2) paid out more claims
3) had more issues with vandalism

After
1) can see if the automatics are down or is having issues and also if customers are not using a certain SS bay
2) in our in bays, cameras pay for themselves quickly by showing previous damage
3) still have the occasional idiot that doesn't care but for the most part we have been vandal free compared to years ago.

I have a 65" TV in my office to only view locations and will change from location to location as the day goes on

 

[bert79]

Before
1) had more down time
2) paid out more claims
3) had more issues with vandalism

After
1) can see if the automatics are down or is having issues and also if customers are not using a certain SS bay
2) in our in bays, cameras pay for themselves quickly by showing previous damage
3) still have the occasional idiot that doesn't care but for the most part we have been vandal free compared to years ago.

I have a 65" TV in my office to only view locations and will change from location to location as the day goes on

We have found exactly the same. Cameras provide us a way to keep an eye on the site and we can see if there is an issue and fix it promptly. The cameras have paid for themselves over and over and over again for sure. I love the idea of a 65" monitor for sure!

 

[mjwalsh]

We have found exactly the same. Cameras provide us a way to keep an eye on the site and we can see if there is an issue and fix it promptly. The cameras have paid for themselves over and over and over again for sure. I love the idea of a 65" monitor for sure!

I have found that for our specific operation ... there is too much loss of productivity for us to be watching the cameras too much. In other words we more rely on the cameras in conjunction with an ALARM TRIGGER!

Alarms that we are in the process of playing with ... tend to allow the ability to send a notification to one or more cell phones. Hopefully, we are not too slow in bringing up the specific camera to verify whatever!

We also appreciate doing heavy duty analysis or audio-video footage on a much larger screen than even though our cell phones' screens are "larger than the average". Volume of any audio recorded can also be turned up more than on our cell phones if needed.

I will say this that identifying perps from camera & even in person is usually more difficult if they are wearing masks ... hmmm.