AOV 24h Explained: What Always-On Video Actually Delivers on a Solar 4G Camera

AOV 24h, answered first

AOV stands for Always-On Video. "AOV 24h" means a battery-powered camera that keeps its sensor and encoder running around the clock and records continuously for all 24 hours of the day, instead of sleeping until a PIR motion sensor wakes it. The camera stays live at low standby power, and on-device AI scene analysis decides what deserves full-quality retention — a person crossing a yard, a vehicle entering a gate — while the rest of the timeline is kept at a reduced rate. The result is a recording with no gaps in it.

One thing buyers ask us constantly, so it is worth saying plainly: AOV is an industry-generic term, not a proprietary feature of any one brand. Any factory can build an AOV camera. What differs between suppliers is whether the power budget behind it is honest, and that is the part a procurement buyer has to verify rather than trust.

Why AOV exists: the failure mode of PIR-triggered cameras

PIR (passive infrared) detection fires on a fast change in heat across the sensor's field. It is cheap, it is power-frugal, and it has three well-documented blind spots that show up the moment a camera is protecting an asset rather than decorating a doorway:

• Slow movement. A person walking deliberately toward a fence line, or crouching and moving low, may never produce the thermal delta PIR needs. The clip never starts.
• Wake-up lag. Even when PIR does fire, the camera has to wake, focus, and begin encoding. The first seconds — often the only seconds showing a face or a plate — are missing.
• Out-of-zone events. PIR only covers its own detection cone. Something happening at the edge of the optical field, but outside the PIR zone, is simply not recorded, even though the lens could see it.

For a warehouse yard, a construction site, a livestock pen or a rural fuel depot, those gaps are exactly where the losses happen. AOV removes the trigger from the equation: the camera is already recording, so there is nothing to wake up and nothing to miss.

The power budget is the whole engineering problem

Continuous recording costs continuous power. On a mains camera that is uninteresting; on a solar 4G camera with no grid connection and no WiFi, it is the entire design constraint. The honest way to evaluate an AOV claim is to look at the battery and the panel together, because a camera that records 24 hours and then cannot recharge is not a 24-hour camera — it is a camera that dies on the third cloudy day.

Across our AOV range the pairings are deliberate:

• 8000mAh battery with an 8W panel — the standard configuration. Suited to sites with reliable daily sun and a normal duty cycle of AI events.
• 20000mAh battery with a 15W panel — the heavy configuration. This is what you specify for monsoon-season Vietnam, for the wet months in Central America and northern South America, for north-facing mounts, and for anywhere partial shade cuts into the charging window.

Distributors routinely under-specify here to hit a price point, then absorb the RMA traffic four months later when the rainy season starts. If the deployment has a real seasonal cloud problem, quote the larger pair. The margin difference is smaller than the cost of a truck roll.

We do not publish autonomy-in-days figures, because a number like that is meaningless without the site's insolation, mounting angle, event frequency and 4G signal strength — a camera on a weak cell signal burns power holding the radio up. Ask any supplier who quotes you a flat "X days without sun" what assumptions produced it. Most cannot answer.

What AOV 24h costs at wholesale

Our catalogue runs to 150 SKUs, with wholesale prices quoted per order. Of those, 49 models are AOV, in four series:

Three reference points buyers ask for by name: SG-C41G-10T66-V1 for the single-lens entry into AOV, SG-D42G-10F66-V1 for dual lens on the standard power pair, and SG-D42G-15F66-V1 for dual lens on the 20000mAh / 15W pair. Full variant lists and specifications are on the product catalogue.

Resolution across the AOV range is 1080p–2K as standard. 4K is available only as a custom or OEM build, and it is worth being clear about why: 4K multiplies the encoding load and the bitrate, which lands straight back on the power budget that makes continuous recording possible in the first place. For most perimeter and yard work, 2K with a second or third lens buys more usable evidence than 4K on a single lens.

Specifying AOV for a real deployment

Storage and retention

Storage is microSD up to 128GB as standard, with larger cards available on custom orders. The practical question for AOV is not card size but retention window — how many days of continuous timeline the camera holds before loop recording overwrites it. That depends entirely on the bitrate profile you configure, so ask the factory to compute it for the profile you actually intend to ship, rather than accepting a headline figure. Sites that need a long legal retention window should plan on higher-capacity cards or cloud offload, and budget the 4G data accordingly.

Environment

All AOV models are IP66. That covers heavy rain, dust and hose-down cleaning, which is the realistic envelope for a pole, a wall or a gatepost. It is not a submersion rating, and we will not let a distributor sell it as one — a camera returned for water ingress after being mounted where it floods is a margin problem for you and a reputation problem for both of us. Where a site genuinely needs a higher ingress rating, say so at quotation and we will discuss a custom build.

Installation

Because there is no grid power and no WiFi dependency, installation runs 5–10 minutes per camera: mount, angle the panel, insert the SIM and the card, pair. For an installer network, that number is the commercial argument. It means a two-person crew can complete a multi-camera site in a morning, and it means your dealers can quote installation as a fixed line item instead of a survey-dependent variable.

Ordering, OEM and lead times

The manufacturer is Shenzhen Leksell, established 2012, TÜV Rheinland certified, with CE, FCC and RoHS on the product side. For importers in Vietnam and Latin America, that certification set is what clears customs and what your own B2B customers' compliance teams will ask to see.

OEM and private label are available on every model, including all 49 AOV SKUs — your brand on the housing, your packaging, your app branding. That is the route most serious distributors take once a trial order has proven the product in their own climate, and it is why the OEM MOQ sits at 100 rather than at the trial threshold.

Our Vietnam office is in Ho Chi Minh City; there is no Hanoi or Bangkok stocking point, so plan regional distribution from HCMC or direct from the factory. Pricing, quantity breaks and final lead times always come from a person, not from a page — the catalogue tells you what ships from stock, and the factory builds beyond it to spec.

Five questions to put to any AOV supplier

Use these on us and on anyone else you are quoting. The answers separate a real AOV product from a PIR camera with a marketing label:

1. Which battery and which panel are paired on this exact model? A capacity quoted without its panel tells you nothing about whether the camera sustains 24-hour operation.
2. What happens to the timeline in low light? Continuous recording at night draws more power, not less. Ask how the camera handles it.
3. What retention window does the standard card give at the bitrate profile you ship? Insist on the configured profile, not a best case.
4. What is the ingress rating, exactly? A supplier who answers with a range is guessing.
5. Can this be built under our brand, and at what quantity? If OEM is gated behind a much larger commitment than the trial order, the supplier is trading, not manufacturing.

If you are evaluating AOV for a distribution territory, the wholesale terms cover pricing structure and shipping, and the dealer programme covers margins and territory. Specification questions on any of the 49 AOV models can go to info@solaguard.net and will be answered by someone with the factory data in front of them.