Having spent more than 30 years in the demanding world of defence equipment, one of my most interesting roles was being responsible for front line equipment reliability.

A British Army General once said to me that he didn’t want his troops to have to carry a single piece of equipment that didn’t work properly. So my challenge was to develop and implement screening techniques during manufacture that delivered this important capability. We call this stress screening and in reliability parlance it is designed to filter out any “early life failures” from the products. This very same principle is applied to all equipment that GuardHome install in clients homes and business premises.

The image below shows a couple of our latest Hi-Def CCTV systems configured and being tested prior to installation in our brand new engineering and test facility.

The upper shelf has a number of cameras which are powered up and connected to the recording devices on the shelf below, which in turn is connected to the monitor on the far right of the upper shelf. Not visible is the network connection which allows us to configure and monitor the whole system from our desk top personal computers. This tests the whole system from the source cameras to the displayed and networked images.

I like to compare this to a Mary Berry recipe,  everything has been tried and tested, so we know that it is going to work. The tested products are the ingredients, and the detailed design specification that we produce for the client, is the recipe. We simply turn up at clients premises and combine the two.

The benefits for the customer is a much more efficient installation process, but more importantly systems that work reliably from the moment they are installed.