AOV Power Explained: The Battery and Panel Budget Behind Always-On Solar Cameras

AOV power in one paragraph

"AOV power" is the energy budget that lets an Always-On Video camera record continuously instead of waking only when a PIR sensor trips. It is not a feature you switch on — it is a battery-and-panel pairing sized so that a day of continuous low-power recording is replaced by a day of harvest. Across SolaGuard's 49 AOV SKUs there are exactly two of these pairings: 8000mAh with an 8W panel, and 20000mAh with a 15W panel. Lens count, price and housing vary across the range; the power architecture does not. Note also that AOV is an industry-generic term — any manufacturer can use it — so when a supplier quotes you "AOV", the only thing that tells you whether it will survive a rainy week is the battery capacity, the panel wattage, and how the camera spends its standby current.

This matters commercially because AOV is the spec most often oversold in this category. A PIR camera can run on a smaller budget precisely because it is asleep most of the time. If a datasheet claims always-on operation on a power budget that looks like a PIR camera's, the honest reading is that "always-on" means something narrower than 24/7 recording.

Where the power actually goes

A solar 4G camera has four significant consumers, and AOV changes the balance between them:

• The image path — sensor, ISP and encoder. Under AOV this runs continuously at a low-power operating point rather than idling.
• AI scene analysis — the part that makes AOV affordable. Instead of uploading everything, the camera classifies what it is seeing on-device and escalates only what matters to full-rate encoding, notification and upload.
• The 4G LTE radio — the single most expensive consumer when it transmits. Continuous recording is local; continuous streaming is not, and conflating the two is how buyers end up disappointed.
• Night illumination and storage writes — recording to the microSD card (up to 128GB as standard, with larger cards available on custom builds).

So AOV power is really a design trade: keep the capture path awake at a low duty cost, keep the radio asleep, and let on-device AI decide when the radio is worth waking. That is also why AOV catches the events PIR misses — slow movement, someone loitering just outside the detection zone, a vehicle approaching at a shallow angle that never crosses the sensor's beam pattern.

The two AOV power classes in the catalogue

SolaGuard's AOV range is 49 SKUs across four series, with wholesale prices quoted per order. Here is how they split by power class:

Three of the four series share the 8000mAh/8W budget; only the SG-D42G-15F66 series steps up to 20000mAh and a 15W panel. That single series is the one to quote when the site has a real harvest problem rather than a resolution problem.

Representative units importers usually sample first: SG-C41G-10T66-V1 (single 2.0MP sensor, 8000mAh, 8W), SG-D42G-10F66-V1 (dual lens, 8000mAh, 8W), and SG-D42G-15F66-V1 (dual lens, 20000mAh, 15W). All are 2K and IP66. Full specifications for each variant are on the product pages.

Resolution across the AOV range is 1080p–2K as standard. 4K exists only as a custom/OEM build, and anyone quoting you 4K off the shelf in this power class is quoting something they are not shipping from stock.

When 8W is enough, and when it is not

The honest answer is that panel wattage is a site question, not a product-tier question. The 8W class is sized for open mounting with a clear southern (or, south of the equator, northern) sky and no long shading window. The 15W class with 20000mAh exists for the cases that break that assumption:

• Partial shade for part of the day — a tree line, a silo, a warehouse roof edge. Harvest loss is not proportional to shaded area; a shadow across a panel can cost far more than it looks like it should.
• Extended overcast — the Vietnamese rainy season, or Andean and Central American highland cloud. Buffer capacity is what carries the camera through consecutive poor-harvest days.
• Compass-constrained mounting — a pole or a wall that fixes the panel's aspect where you don't want it.
• Heavy night activity — sites where illumination and event upload run most of the night rather than occasionally.

For a distributor, the practical consequence is stock mix. Quoting only the 8W class wins the price comparison and generates the warranty conversations; quoting only the 15W class prices you out of the easy sites. Most importers land on a majority of 8W units with the SG-D42G-15F66 series held for the difficult installs and for the customer who has already been burned by a cheaper camera.

What AOV power means for your order

All of this comes from Shenzhen Leksell, manufacturing since 2012 and certified by TÜV Rheinland, with CE, FCC and RoHS on the product side. Our Vietnam office is in Ho Chi Minh City.

OEM and private label are available on every model, including all 49 AOV units — housing marking, packaging and app branding. Custom builds can also change the power budget itself (a larger battery or panel than the standard pairing), higher resolution, or greater storage; those are quoted individually, because the moment you change the power budget you change the BOM, the MOQ conversation and the lead time. Terms for both stock and custom programmes are set out on the wholesale page.

Installation is 5–10 minutes per camera — a bracket, a panel angle and a SIM. That number is not a marketing figure so much as a margin figure: for an installer-distributor it determines how many units a two-person crew places in a day, and it is one of the few specs in this category you can verify with a stopwatch on your sample order.

Five questions to put to any AOV supplier

Use these on us and on everyone else you are quoting. They are the ones that separate a real AOV power budget from a relabelled PIR camera:

1. What are the exact battery capacity and panel wattage? Not "high capacity". A number, per SKU. Ours are 8000mAh/8W and 20000mAh/15W, and nothing in the AOV range sits outside that.
2. Is "always-on" continuous recording, or continuous standby with motion-triggered recording? These are different products.
3. Does the AI run on-device or in the cloud? Cloud inference means the radio transmits constantly, which changes the power budget completely.
4. What happens after several consecutive low-harvest days? A supplier who has thought about this will tell you how the camera degrades — a graceful reduction in activity beats an unexplained outage.
5. Which figures hold at the MOQ you are actually quoting? Sample-unit specs and production specs should be identical. Ask for it in writing.

If you want to test the answers rather than read them, the shortest path is a 10-unit trial across both power classes — a few 8W units on your easiest site and a couple of SG-D42G-15F66 units on your worst one — and then scale the mix you measured. Dealer terms and pricing for that first order are straightforward, or write to info@solaguard.net with the site conditions and we will tell you which class fits before you buy.