I’m John — former CCTV Team Leader and Cat 1 Gold Standard ARC supervisor.

After thousands of real incidents, there’s one mistake I see more than anything else.

People trust motion detection far more than they should.

Motion detection is great when tuned properly… but most systems run on default sensitivity, default zones, and default thresholds.

That leads to two big problems:

1. False alarms
Trees, shadows, headlights, insects, rain — all triggering events that drown out the real ones.

2. Missed incidents
The camera simply doesn’t trigger when someone approaches from the “wrong” angle or moves too slowly.

In monitoring centres, we see this constantly. A break‑in happens, but the clip starts halfway through because the motion trigger didn’t fire until the person was already inside.

Here’s how to fix it:
• Set custom zones (doors, windows, paths, not the whole garden)
• Increase sensitivity at night, decrease it during the day
• Use “person detection” if your system supports it
• Add a static snapshot every 30 seconds as a backup

For tips like this and more check out the podcast CCTV Unlocked.

🎧 CCTV Unlocked:
https://open.spotify.com/show/2QUBBay7kfXt6Qq5DVWLm0?si=mUJ3jc9gQheUBMgUD735Fw

If anyone wants, I can do a full post on:
• night‑vision tuning
• shop/warehouse layouts
• how burglars actually behave
• the best home setup for under £500

Happy to share more.