Altronix Power Solutions for Chicago Security Systems

The company that quietly powers everyone else’s security

Altronix is the brand in a security closet that nobody photographs and everybody depends on. It was founded in 1983 and is still run out of Brooklyn, New York — privately held, family-run, and stubbornly American-made: every unit is built in the U.S. and backed by a lifetime warranty. Four decades in, it has become the default power behind a large share of the commercial camera and access-control systems installed in this country. What it makes is unglamorous and essential — low-voltage power supplies, PoE switches, and access-power controllers that take messy building power and turn it into clean, monitored, battery-backed voltage that security gear can actually trust.

We put Altronix on most of our access and camera jobs for a boring reason: the boring stuff is what causes callbacks. A reader that browns out at 3 a.m. or a maglock that drops on a power blip is a problem you only want to solve once. Their gear reports its own status, holds a battery, and drops cleanly into the power and UPS design we build around every system.

What Altronix actually makes

The catalog is broad, but it sorts into a few families. The AL- and SMP-series power supplies are the workhorses — filtered, fused, battery-backup-ready 12/24V DC that feeds cameras, card readers, and locks; the AL400ULX and AL600ULACM are the ones we reach for most on access jobs. For a rack-mounted CCTV head-end, Altronix makes rack-mount CCTV power supplies that fan out cleanly to a wall of cameras; the multi-output ALTV1224DC2 is a typical pick. There are outdoor-rated supplies for gate and perimeter work, and dedicated maglock and door-strike power like the StrikeIt line for lock hardware that has to fail safely.

Power that talks to the fire alarm

The piece integrators actually search for — “altronix power supply with a fire alarm relay,” the FireSwitch 108 — is Altronix’s real specialty. Life-safety code requires that magnetic locks release when the fire alarm trips, and Altronix builds power controllers and fire-alarm interface modules (FireSwitch) that drop lock power on an alarm signal, cleanly and verifiably. On any building with maglocks on an egress path, that fire-alarm-relay power is not optional, and it’s one of the first things we spec.

PoE and transmission

Altronix also lives on the network side. Their NetWay PoE and PoE+ switches and midspans push power and data out to IP cameras and readers, and the PoE injector line adds power to a single run where a full switch is overkill. For long cable runs that exceed Ethernet’s 100-meter limit, their transmission products stretch power and data over distances copper alone can’t. It all ties back into why we treat PoE budgeting as a real line item rather than an afterthought.

Altronix in a Chicago install

For a Chicago building, Altronix is usually the invisible layer that keeps everything else honest through a hard winter and a few power sags. We size it per project — how many doors, how many cameras, how much battery backup, whether the maglocks need fire-alarm release — and build it into the same enclosure discipline as the rest of the system. Browse the Altronix power supplies we stock, or reach out and we’ll size the power for your doors and cameras.