Keeping a Site Watched Through the Tet Shutdown: 7–10 Days, No Power, Nobody There

The short answer

For the 7–10 days a construction site or storage yard sits completely empty over Tet, the workable answer is a solar-powered 4G LTE camera recording continuously in AOV mode, with a prepaid data SIM and a freshly formatted card, installed before the crew leaves. No grid connection is required, no WiFi, and nobody has to stay on site. Each unit mounts in 5–10 minutes on a pole, a container corner or a run of hoarding, and is viewable from a phone anywhere. The decisive choice is not whether to put a camera up — it is the recording mode. A PIR-triggered camera spends nine quiet days asleep and, when someone finally arrives, records from a few seconds after they are already inside the yard. Continuous recording is what produces the material a police report can actually use: what time the vehicle entered, how many people, which way they left.

Nine days is longer than nine days

A Lunar New Year shutdown is written as 7–10 days, but the site is unattended for considerably longer. Crews from distant provinces leave several days before the official holiday and return in a trickle for a week after it.

Realistically that is 200–300 continuous hours with no human eyes on the asset. It is worth putting that number next to the cost of a camera. And it repeats — Tet in Vietnam, the same pattern for Lunar New Year across the region, and again at every long national holiday.

What actually disappears during a shutdown

Not the tower crane. What goes is what a scrap yard buys the same morning:

• Copper cable pulled but not yet terminated — the highest value per metre on site and the easiest to cut.
• Rebar, sections, formwork ties — sold by weight, no provenance asked.
• Scaffolding tube, props and couplers — quick to strike, fits a small truck.
• Welders, cut-off saws, compactors, water pumps — anything two people can carry.
• Diesel from generators and any plant left standing.
• Temporary panels, batteries and distribution boards on sites that already have a temporary supply.

Open storage yards add palletised stock, tyres, coils, unsecured containers and, where the gate is weak, forklifts.

Why the usual answers do not cover the gap

Hiring a holiday guard. Rates multiply over the holiday, and one person alone on a large plot for nine days realistically stays near the gate hut. Without recording there is still no evidence.

Cameras on the temporary supply. Temporary power goes off when the generator is shut down, or the client isolates the board for fire safety before the break. Those cameras are dark from the afternoon the crew leaves.

Battery cameras on PIR. This is the common choice and the common failure:

• Nine days with nothing entering the detection cone means nine days asleep, and wake-up latency then removes the part of the clip containing the vehicle and the plate.
• A PIR sensor covers a narrow arc in front of the lens. Someone walking the hoarding line, or a truck parked outside the gate, never crosses it.
• Warm weather flattens the thermal contrast PIR depends on, reducing sensitivity.
• After a run of overcast days a depleted battery makes the camera throttle its own sensitivity and clip length — least capable exactly when it matters most.
• Tarpaulins moving in the wind and stray dogs fill the phone with junk alerts until notifications get muted on day two.

AOV — Always-On Video — is the industry-generic term for continuous recording at low standby power, with on-device AI scene analysis deciding which segments deserve full quality and an alert. Nothing waits for a heat signature, so the approach, the vehicle and the second person waiting at the gate are all on the card.

The pre-shutdown checklist

Where to put them

Construction site. One at the main gate covering the vehicle route rather than shooting into oncoming headlights; one over the steel and cable laydown; one on the tool container. If the hoarding has several weak points, cover the one nearest a main road — that is the one they will use.

Open yard. One at the gate, one across the outdoor pallet rows, one at the pinch point where a loaded truck has to slow down. On a large yard, covering traffic bottlenecks beats trying to cover area.

Hardware requirements are straightforward: IP66 on outdoor models for rain and site dust, 1080p–2K standard across the catalogue with 4K only as a custom or OEM build, 4G LTE with a SIM so no WiFi is needed, and 5–10 minutes to install each unit.

The first day back

Before the crew comes through the gate, do three things. Reconcile the material against the last count taken before the break. Filter the AI events by day to find every person and vehicle detection, then scrub back twenty minutes from each one — that pre-roll is the whole reason for recording continuously. Export anything suspect immediately, because continuous recording overwrites the oldest footage and the retention window is finite. Footage with an entry time, an exit time and a direction of travel is usable by police; a two-second motion clip is not.

Ordering in time

Vietnam orders deliver in 7–10 business days; samples ship 7–10 days by air and bulk 25–40 days by sea. To have cameras mounted before the crew leaves, the order has to be confirmed at least three weeks earlier — later than that and only stock already in country will do it. Which is also the dealer's opportunity: the demand is entirely predictable and arrives late.

The catalogue is 150 SKUs with wholesale prices quoted per order, OEM and private label available on all of them, MOQ 10 for a trial and 100 for OEM/ODM, with dealer margin at 20% from around 10 units and 30% from around 50. Manufacturing is by Shenzhen Leksell — TÜV Rheinland certified, established 2012, plus CE, FCC and RoHS. The Vietnam office is in Ho Chi Minh City.

See the range at /en/products/, the technical background in the AOV solar camera guide, and volume terms at /en/wholesale/.

For a quotation against a specific site plan, message WhatsApp +86 188 1869 9870 or email info@solaguard.net. Quantity, pricing and lead time are always confirmed by a person.