Elevator Cameras — Cable Routing and Vandal Risk

Mounting position decides the value of the footage

Mount the camera in the corner opposite the doors, high enough that a raised arm cannot reach it and low enough that it captures faces rather than scalps. From that corner, one camera sees the doors, the button panel and the whole car, which covers both the identification case and the incident case.

A camera above the doors looking down gives you a row of heads and nothing else. It is the most common lift camera mistake and it is only discovered when somebody actually needs the footage.

Getting the cable into a moving car

The camera needs power and data, and the car moves. The connection runs through the travelling cable — the same bundle that carries the car's own control and lighting circuits — which means the work is coordinated with the lift contractor, not done independently.

Plan the port on the building switch in advance. With PoE over the travelling cable you carry power and data together and avoid running a separate mains feed into the car, which is usually the harder permission to obtain. Where the existing travelling cable has no spare pairs, the lift contractor may need to add them, and that is a scheduled activity rather than a same-day job.

Vibration, doors and the environment

• Use a mount that does not rely on a single screw into the car ceiling panel — a lift car ceiling is a cosmetic panel, not a structural surface.
• Expect motion alerts during travel and when the doors operate. Narrow the detection zone to the door threshold, or the recorder will fill with events.
• The car is an enclosed metal box, so check wireless coverage is irrelevant and PoE is genuinely the simpler choice.
• Doors closing on a protruding camera is a real failure mode. A flush dome avoids it entirely.

Recording and retention for lift footage

Lift footage is usually wanted for a specific incident, so retention matters more than frame rate. At 5 MP with H.265+ a lift channel costs roughly the same as any other channel in the storage calculation, so a 20-floor building with one camera per lift adds four to eight channels to the recorder — a straightforward addition if it is planned at the sizing stage and an expensive one if it is retrofitted after the switch and recorder are already fully loaded.

Decide the retention period before you size the drives. Thirty days is a common requirement and it roughly doubles the storage of a fifteen-day policy.