Construction Site Solar 4G CCTV: The Complete Equipment and Installation Checklist

The checklist, per camera position

Every solar 4G camera position on an active construction site needs the same eleven items, and installs fail on the ones people forget rather than on the camera itself. Take this list to site and tick it off at each mounting point before anyone climbs a ladder:

Items 4 and 9 are the two that decide whether a solar 4G deployment works. Everything else is logistics.

Why construction sites break conventional CCTV

A construction site is the hardest environment a camera can be asked to work in, and it is hard for reasons that have nothing to do with image quality.

There is no mains power at the perimeter, and there will not be until the building is nearly finished — which is exactly when the security risk drops. Trenching power to a fence line costs more than the cameras and gets cut by the next excavator. There is no fixed broadband either, and site WiFi, where it exists, covers the site office and nothing else.

The site also changes shape constantly. A camera that covers the material compound in month one is looking at a finished slab in month four. Anything hard-wired becomes a liability the moment the site plan moves, which is why solar 4G units — self-powered, self-connected, moved by two people with a ladder — have become the default for perimeter and compound coverage rather than a compromise.

And the threat is specific: theft of copper, fuel, plant and fixings, usually at night, usually by someone who knows the site is empty. That threat profile is what makes the recording mode matter more than the megapixel count.

PIR-triggered versus AOV recording

Most battery cameras record only when a passive infrared sensor fires. PIR detects heat moving across its zones, which means it reliably misses a person moving slowly, a person moving directly toward the lens, anything happening outside the narrow PIR cone, and — on a hot afternoon — a person whose surface temperature is close to the background.

AOV (Always-On Video) is the industry-generic term for continuous 24/7 recording held at low standby power by AI scene analysis rather than by a motion trigger. The camera is always recording; the analysis decides what is worth flagging and what resolution of attention the scene deserves. For a site investigation, the difference is decisive: with AOV you have the whole night, so you can follow a vehicle back through the footage to where it entered. With PIR you have a folder of disconnected clips and gaps you cannot explain to an insurer.

Sizing the camera to the position

The SolaGuard AOV range is 49 SKUs across four series, with wholesale prices quoted per order. All four are 2K and IP66-rated; what separates them is lens count and the battery/panel pairing.

The sizing rule is simple. Positions with a clean, unobstructed sun arc run comfortably on the 8000mAh / 8W platform — a gate camera on an open perimeter, for example, is well served by the SG-C41G-10T66-V1, or the dual-lens SG-D42G-10F66-V1 where you want a wide view and a detail view from one unit.

Positions with a compromised sun arc need the 20000mAh / 15W platform: the SG-D42G-15F66-V1 is the unit to specify where a tower crane, a scaffold wrap, an adjacent building or a north-facing elevation costs the panel part of its day. The larger battery buys autonomy through a run of overcast days; the larger panel recharges it in the shorter window the site geometry allows. Specifying the cheap platform into a shaded position is the single most common failure in solar CCTV, and it does not show up until the first bad week of weather. The full catalogue runs to 150 SKUs, with wholesale prices quoted per order and the AOV models covered in detail on the product pages.

On resolution: 1080p–2K is the standard build across the range, and 2K is the right specification for site work — it holds plate and face detail at perimeter distances without inflating the bitrate the 4G connection and the microSD card have to carry. 4K is available as a custom/OEM build where a project genuinely requires it.

The 4G and storage side of the survey

Signal is the item most often assumed and least often tested. Before you commit to a mounting point, put a handset on the same carrier at the exact height and orientation the camera will occupy and check the actual signal, not the bars on the way in through the gate. Reinforced concrete cores, steel frames, tower cranes and site hoardings all attenuate; a position that tested clean at ground level can be marginal at mounting height, and a position that was clean in month one can be shadowed by a structure that did not exist in month three.

Buy the SIM from a carrier that tested well at that specific site. On a multi-site project this means accepting that different sites may run different carriers — irritating for procurement, far cheaper than a camera that uploads nothing.

Storage is microSD up to 128GB as standard, with larger cards available on custom orders. Treat the card as the evidential record and the cloud as the remote convenience copy: a camera with a card in it keeps recording through a 4G outage, and a camera without one has no record of anything the network dropped. Buy the cards as part of the camera order rather than locally in a hurry — counterfeit and relabelled cards are endemic in exactly the markets where sites need them most, and a card that fails silently is indistinguishable from a camera that failed.

Weatherproofing and what IP66 actually buys

The outdoor models are IP66: fully dust-tight, and protected against powerful water jets from any direction. On a construction site that covers what actually happens — driving rain, dust storms off a haul road, and the pressure washer someone points at your camera housing while cleaning the hoarding. Specify a higher ingress rating only if units will genuinely be immersed, which on a building site is a flood scenario rather than an operating condition.

Installation day and commissioning

Mounting and commissioning a solar camera takes 5–10 minutes per unit once the survey is done, which is the entire economic argument for this equipment class: a two-person crew can cover a perimeter in a morning and re-cover it in another morning when the site plan changes.

Run installs in this order:

1. Charge before you travel. Batteries arrive partially charged. Bring them up fully the night before so the camera starts its first night with a full reserve rather than whatever the afternoon gave it.
2. Insert the SIM and the microSD card on the ground. Never at the top of a ladder. Confirm the camera comes online and records before it leaves your hands.
3. Mount the bracket, then the camera. Pole clamp, scaffold bracket or wall plate — whichever the position takes.
4. Aim the panel, then aim the lens. In that order. The panel angle is what keeps the camera alive; the view can be adjusted on the app afterwards, the panel angle cannot be adjusted from the ground.
5. Fit the anti-theft housing and the security fasteners.
6. Commission on the app at the pole. Check the live view, confirm the recording mode, confirm signal strength at final mounting height, set detection zones to exclude the road and the neighbour's yard.
7. Label the unit and log it. Serial, position, SIM number, date. On a site where cameras move monthly, an unlogged unit is a lost unit.

The detection-zone step in point 6 is worth the extra two minutes. A camera pointed at a public road generates alerts all night, and a security team that has learned to ignore your alerts is worse than no alerts at all.

The procurement checklist

For distributors and importers specifying these for construction clients, the commercial terms matter as much as the hardware.

The trial-then-scale path is the sensible one for construction: order 10 units, put them on a live site through a full weather cycle and a full site-plan change, confirm the battery platform you specified actually holds in your climate and your shading conditions, then scale. Sites are unforgiving test environments, which is precisely why a site trial tells you more in six weeks than a datasheet comparison tells you ever.

For OEM and private-label programmes, the 100-unit threshold applies and branding is available across the range rather than on a restricted subset — worth knowing if you intend to build a site-security proposition under your own name. Trade terms and volume pricing are set out on the wholesale page, and territory arrangements on the dealer page. Quantity, project pricing and lead times for a specific order always come from a person: write to info@solaguard.net with the site count, the shading conditions and the timeline, and you get a specification and a quote rather than a catalogue.