Sourcing kit for a job shouldn’t feel like a treasure hunt, but recently it has, more than once.
I had a job booked in that needed four Ajax TurretCam HL 8MP cameras to complete it. I found three without too much trouble. The fourth, a TurretCam HL 8MP in black, either 4mm or 2.8mm, turned out to be genuinely impossible to find anywhere with a lead time that actually worked for the job. I spent the best part of a week calling round distributors, chasing stock lists that turned out to be more theoretical than real.
This wasn’t a one-off. It’s become a pattern.
Good kit, bad availability
I want to be clear about something first: Ajax make excellent equipment. Genuinely some of the best on the market for wireless security, and it’s a large part of why Ajax Installer exists as a directory in the first place. This isn’t a complaint about the product. It’s a complaint about actually getting your hands on it.
Availability has become a real pain point for installers trying to plan work with any confidence. You quote a job, you commit to a date with a customer, and then you’re left hoping the last piece of the puzzle turns up in time. That’s not a comfortable place to run a business from, and it’s certainly not where I want CCTV Aware sitting when we’ve told a customer a date.
Why this is worth saying out loud
I don’t think enough installers talk about this publicly, and customers rarely hear about it at all, mostly because nobody wants to admit that a job might slip because a specific camera in a specific colour and focal length simply isn’t sitting on a shelf anywhere in the country. But pretending it isn’t happening doesn’t help anyone. If you’re a customer reading this and a quote comes back with a slightly longer lead time than you expected, this is very often why. It’s not the installer dragging their feet, it’s the supply chain.
If you’re another installer dealing with the same wall, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone in it. I’d genuinely like to hear how other people are handling it, whether that’s holding more stock upfront, building longer lead times into quotes as standard, or just accepting the odd delay as the cost of specifying good kit.
Either way, it’s worth saying plainly: the kit is worth the wait. Just build the wait into the plan before the customer does it for you.