NVR Built-in POE: Setup and Troubleshooting

Setup

Many IC Realtime recorders have a built-in PoE switch to make deployment easy. While it makes installs simple, built-in PoE does not work in every scenario. Occasionally, you will need to use an external switch. The most common reasons are:

• Using a camera that has multiple channels,
• Using a PoE+, Hi-PoE/alternate PoE standard camera.
• Using 3rd party devices. These devices don’t always integrate seamlessly. Besides having different protocols, they will regularly not know how to handle proprietary network packets, causing them to have a volatile connection.

Our recorders have plug-and-play technologies built in.  If using any of our current and new mainline cameras, just plug the camera out of the box and into the appropriate port.

After a short amount of time, the NVR will initialize the camera (it will also give it the NVR's password for the admin login) and the camera will be displayed in the NVR interface.

Troubleshooting

The NVR built-in POE does not allow multi-channel cameras to connect directly to the built-in PoE of the recorder. The internal NVR switch expects one device per port.

• Multi-lens cameras (such as the IPEL-DL80F) will typically have more than one channel per port and will not know how to bind the second channel to the second port. If you don’t use an external switch, you will see problems with the multi-lens camera knocking off other cameras.

Also, if a camera had been plugged in to one port and initialized, the NVR will typically bind the camera to that port.

• Trying to reorganize camera channels by deleting and re-adding them on the remote device/ registration section can cause issues such as duplicated or constantly dropping channels/ cameras.
• It is best to label the camera connections and then plug them into the back of the NVR PoE in the proper order.
• If having camera/ channel duplications or constant drops, it is best to disconnect the cameras from the NVR PoE, factory reset the NVR and then plug the cameras in the proper order after initializing the NVR.

Last, most of our NVRs output 48V and 25W per port. There are many larger PTZ cameras that require significantly higher wattage or 3rd party devices that may use non-standard PoE like 24V. Using an external switch with alternate methods of power will produce the best results.