CCTV for warehouses and distribution units

How to size and place warehouse CCTV

The loading bay is the most valuable view in a warehouse and it wants two cameras, not one: a bullet framing the vehicle and the driver as it reverses in — the plate itself needs a dedicated ANPR camera, not a general-purpose one — and a turret on the dock edge catching what actually comes off the pallet. Racking aisles, the goods-in desk, mezzanine stairs, the yard gate and the fire doors nobody watches come after that.

Height is where warehouse installs fail. A camera on the roof steel at 8 m gives a beautiful map of the floor and the top of everybody's head. Anything that has to identify a person belongs at 3 to 4 m on a column or a wall, angled so a face crosses the frame at chest height. Keep the high positions for overview and movement.

Racking aisles are a lens problem, not a camera-count problem. A 2.8 mm turret at the end of a 40 m aisle turns a person at the far end into a handful of pixels. A 6 mm lens on a 4 MP camera still only puts about 70 pixels per metre on someone at the far end — enough to see that a person is there, not to recognise them. For recognition down a 40 m aisle you want around 8 mm on a 4K camera or 11 to 12 mm on a 4 MP one; for identification, a motorised varifocal set around 15 to 25 mm at commissioning, or split the aisle between two cameras.

Light and air are the other two. High-bay LED and legacy sodium both cast colour that wrecks white balance, which is why ColorVu and Smart Hybrid Light cameras cope — they bring their own. Near racking dust or a washdown bay, ask for a body rated IP66 AND IP67 — they are different tests, not a ladder: 66 is the jetting rating and 67 is temporary immersion, and most Hikvision and Dahua bodies carry both. Pair it with a matched junction box: an IP-rated camera on an unsealed back box is not IP-rated.

Then size the storage honestly, because this is where warehouse quotes quietly fail. Eight and sixteen-camera kits here record a median of 28 days as supplied. At 32 channels that collapses to a median of 17 days, and just 0 of the 274 in-stock 32-camera builds reach 31 days without a bigger drive. If you need a month at 32 cameras you are buying storage, not just channels — put your real camera mix through the storage calculator before you commit.

Last, plan the network. A recorder's built-in PoE ports are a convenience, not a switch: past eight cameras put CCTV on its own switch and its own VLAN so a stock-take scanner cannot drop a stream.

Sources: The ICO's video surveillance guidance · The ICO's CCTV advice for small organisations