Pest Watch: what moves in the kitchen overnight

What it does

Svid describes every frame of the footage it watches, and Pest Watch is a paid check over those descriptions, running on every analysed frame of the cameras it's enabled on. It's told to look carefully in the places pests actually use: floor edges, under equipment, along shelving, and to flag the small fast blur near the floor that a small animal usually is on camera. When something matches, the alert says what was seen and where, with a link to the exact moment.

Before the EHO finds it first

Pests move when people don't, which is how a clean daytime inspection and an infestation manage to coexist for months. The stakes are not small: under UK Food Standards Agency enforcement guidance, a single failed environmental-health inspection can close a food business on the spot. Finding the evidence on your own cameras first changes the shape of the problem. You ring the pest controller with a timestamp and a clip instead of waiting for an inspector to ring you.

Overnight is also when the check is cheapest to run. All three watch levels are motion-gated, so the frames of an empty, still kitchen get no AI calls at all. The frames that do get analysed are the ones where something moved, and at 3am, something moving is rather the point.

What an alert looks like

Alerts land on screen and by email, so the overnight flags are in the inbox before morning prep starts, and a JSON webhook is there for anything you'd rather automate. One event fires one alert; a re-fire within two minutes is recorded as the same event continuing rather than a new one.

Where it runs

It's enabled per camera: the kitchen, the dry store, the waste area, the racking aisle. It reads RTSP feeds from the existing recorder, uploaded files, or a propped phone. Small animals are quick, so the Precise watch level (a frame every second at 1080p) suits the riskiest corners, with Standard often enough elsewhere. Recorded footage goes through the same pipeline as live, so a fair trial is uploading last week's overnight export and reading what it flags, and a folder of overnight cameras can have the check applied in one action. For sites where footage can't leave the network, there's a fully on-prem appliance mode.

What it costs

The Store prices Pest Watch from your own usage before you buy: cameras, hours a day and watch level become a live figure shown as ‘+$X/mo at your usage’. The subscription underneath is priced from your own usage with a $9 a month floor, derivation on screen at signup. The pricing section has the arithmetic.

Can CCTV really pick up a mouse?

If it's visible in frame, it can be flagged. The check studies floor edges, under equipment and along shelving, and it's told to mention small fast animals that show up as a blur near the floor. What the camera can't see, nothing can flag, so cameras placed low over the risky corners do better than one wide shot of the room.

What do I do with an alert?

Open the clip, confirm what it was, and pass the timestamp and location to your pest controller. The flags also build a record that you found the problem and acted on it, which is a better file to show an inspector than nothing.

Isn't running cameras all night expensive?

Less than you'd think. Motion gating means the still frames of an empty room get no AI calls, and the Store shows the exact monthly figure for your cameras before you buy.