A polished quote tells you almost nothing about whether an installer actually understood your site. The questions below tell you more in five minutes than a comparison of three price lists will in a week.
Ask these of us. Ask them of anyone else. An installer with nothing to hide answers all of them without hesitation.
Why the quote is not the useful part
Any installer can produce a number. What separates a real proposal from a guess is whether it was built from a walk of your actual site - your lighting, your cable routes, your retention needs - or assembled from a standard package with your address typed into the header. The quote looks similar either way. The answers to these questions do not.
Questions about the survey itself
- “Did you check the live view at night from each camera position?” Daytime-only surveys miss the single most common source of disappointment - footage that looks fine on a bright afternoon and useless after dark.
- “What retention will this system deliver, and how did you calculate it?” A number produced on the spot from disk size, camera count and resolution is a calculation. A round figure with no working is a guess.
- “What existing cabling are you reusing, and what needs to be run new?” An installer who cannot answer this did not actually check your walls before quoting.
- “What did you decide against installing, and why?” A survey worth its name finds positions that are not worth a camera as often as it finds ones that are. If everything you asked about got a yes, nobody actually assessed it.
Questions about the hardware
- “What brand and model, specifically?” If it is not written on the quote, the warranty and firmware support path does not exist in any enforceable way.
- “What happens to retention if I add two more cameras next year?” Tests whether the recorder was sized with headroom or exactly to today's count.
- “Is the recorder rated for the IP or environmental conditions at each position?” Relevant for outdoor, industrial or wash-down positions specifically - a domestic-grade camera in a dusty shed fails early and predictably.
Questions about support after installation
- “What is your response time for a fault, in writing?” Not “as soon as possible” - a number. This single answer predicts more about the relationship than anything else on this list.
- “Will I get an admin password, a view-only account, and a written handover?” Systems handed over verbally with no documentation become unmaintainable the day the installer stops answering the phone.
- “Do you service systems you did not install?” An installer who refuses is telling you they expect their own work to be the last time anyone looks at it, which is not how equipment actually behaves over five years.
The one question that predicts the rest
“Can I speak to a client with a site similar to mine that you installed?” A confident installer answers this immediately, because the work speaks for itself. Reluctance or a request to “check and get back to you” is itself an answer.
None of this is unique to us. It is the honest version of what any of the questions above are actually testing: did somebody walk your site and think about it, or did somebody read your address off an enquiry form.
Common questions
Should I be suspicious of the cheapest quote?
Not automatically - price alone tells you little. A cheap quote that names its hardware, states its retention with working shown, and lists what it excludes is a better buy than an expensive one that does none of those things. The questions above matter more than the total at the bottom of the page.
Is it normal for a survey to be free?
Yes, among installers who expect to win the work on the strength of what they find. A free survey that produces a generic price list rather than site-specific findings has not really been a survey, regardless of what it was called.
How many quotes should I actually get?
Two properly surveyed quotes beat three vague ones. What matters is that each was produced after somebody walked the site, not the count. A phone-quoted price and a surveyed price are not comparable numbers, whatever they look like side by side.