We install IP camera systems and door access control for homes and businesses across the North Shore and the Merrimack Valley, in buildings that are often a century older than the technology going into them.
Much of the housing and commercial stock here predates the idea of running a cable anywhere. Balloon framing with firestops in unexpected places, plaster and lath that cracks if you look at it wrong, finished basements, slate and copper roofs, and attics that are either inaccessible or converted. The craft in this work is getting a clean cable path without opening a wall you will then have to pay a plasterer to close.
We spend real time on route planning before anything is cut, and we are frank when a wired run would do more damage than it is worth. There are places where a well chosen wireless camera on a good bridge is the right answer, and we would rather tell you that than leave you with a repair bill.
In the historic districts, exterior appearance is a live constraint. Camera colour, housing profile and where a conduit shows all matter to a commission review, and planning for that at the design stage is cheaper than redoing it after.
Within sight of the water, from Newburyport down through Ipswich and Beverly to Marblehead, corrosion is the thing that eventually kills an exterior camera. Not the sensor, the connector. We seal and weatherproof outdoor terminations properly, specify housings that can take a marine environment, and avoid mounting positions that trap salt spray against the body of the camera. It is unglamorous and it is the difference between a system that lasts eight years and one that starts failing in two.
Downtown storefronts here sit directly on the street, which means a camera covering your own entrance will often take in public pavement and sometimes a neighbour's window. We set privacy masks on the areas that are not yours to record and we document where they are. It costs nothing and it is the first thing anyone asks about.
Any business that owns or licenses personal information about a Massachusetts resident falls under 201 CMR 17.00, the Commonwealth's data security regulation, which requires a written information security program and specific controls on the systems that hold that information. A camera recorder and an access controller are networked computers holding records about identifiable people.
We treat them that way. They go on their own network segment with their own credentials and their own update path, not on the same flat network as the till and the office printer. If you are being asked about this by an insurer or a client, we can put what was installed and how it is segmented in writing.
We walk the building and agree every camera position on site, then give you a layout showing what each one sees before anything is ordered. Cable goes in labelled and documented, the system is commissioned and tuned for the light each camera will actually face, and we finish by showing the people who will use it how to pull footage.
On an occupied commercial site we schedule the noisy and disruptive parts around your trading hours. On a residential job we protect finishes and we clean up, which should not be worth mentioning and unfortunately is.
If your town is not listed, ask. LavIT Solutions works nationwide, with teams based in Loudon, New Hampshire and Dallas, Texas. The list above is simply where this crew is most often, and managed IT, cybersecurity and cloud work is delivered anywhere in the country.
Usually. Exterior cameras can often be fed from a basement or crawl space up through an existing chase, and there are nearly always a few routes a careful installer can use that a fast one will not bother to find. Where there genuinely is no path, we say so and offer the wireless option rather than quietly making the hole.
That is your call and we set it up either way. A local recorder keeps everything on site under your control. A cloud system keeps a copy offsite, which survives the recorder being stolen but depends on your upload speed and carries a subscription. Many clients end up with local recording plus cloud copies of events only.
Where it uses open standards, yes, and integrating the two so that an alarm event pulls up the right camera is usually straightforward. Some older proprietary panels will not talk to anything else, and we will tell you that before you pay us to try.
Camera installation itself generally does not, but several municipalities here require a permit or registration for a monitored burglar alarm, and the rules differ town by town. We will tell you what applies in your town and what it involves.