Securing an Open Storage Yard With No Fence, No Lighting and No Mains Power

The short answer: cover the stacks, not the boundary

An open material yard with no fence, no lighting and no mains supply at the far end is not a perimeter problem — it is a cluster problem. Stop trying to ring the boundary and place a self-powered 4G LTE camera at each thing worth stealing: the steel stack, the timber, the bagged cement, the container run, the vehicle entrance and the overnight truck park. Each camera is a closed system — panel, battery, SIM, memory card — so nothing has to be trenched to the far corner, and once the mount is up the install is 5–10 minutes per camera. Set them to record continuously in AOV mode, because yard losses show up as a stock discrepancy with no timestamp attached, and there is no alarm to search for.

The rest of this article is the engineering detail: mounting height, pole options, panel orientation and moving shade, night imaging with no lights on site, cellular signal at the back of the yard, and how to size storage for continuous recording.

Why the perimeter model breaks down here

Perimeter design assumes a physical boundary — a wall, a fence, a gate. An open yard has none of the properties that make it work.

• No line to defend. Entry happens from any direction, often along the haul road itself.
• Boundary length is out of proportion to value. Ringing several hundred metres takes many positions, while the losses concentrate in a handful of stacks.
• The stock blocks its own sightlines. A three-metre steel stack delivered on Tuesday turns a good camera angle into a view of a wall.

Cluster coverage inverts the question. Not "how do I see the whole yard" but "what is worth taking, what does someone have to walk past to reach it, and which route does a vehicle use to carry it out".

The governing rule: one camera identifies, the rest narrate. A single wide angle asked to do both jobs does neither.

Poles, height and sightlines

Mounting height

Height is a three-way trade between reach-resistance, clearing the stacks, and pixels on target.

• Too low: reachable, and screened by the next delivery.
• Too high: you look at the tops of heads, faces are lost and plates are foreshortened.
• Workable: above the reach of a person standing on a truck bed, still looking obliquely rather than straight down.

The plate camera is the exception — mount it lower than the others and close to parallel with the direction of travel. Steep off-axis angles are the most common reason plates are unreadable, far more often than resolution.

Freestanding mounts where there is nothing to fix to

Open yards rarely offer a wall. Three options work:

1. A steel pole in a precast ballast block, heavy enough to stay put but liftable by a forklift when the yard layout changes. This is the most flexible arrangement.
2. Container corners — corner castings or clamps on the corrugations. Stable, already there, and moves with the box.
3. A buried pole, only where the position is certain for years.

Because there is no power or data cable, the pole only has to resist wind and vibration, not carry a cable route. That is why a new position can be stood up in a morning.

Panel orientation and the shade that moves

A material yard is hard on solar panels — not because of the weather but because of dust and migrating shade.

• Orientation. Face the panel toward the equator side of the sky: south across Vietnam and most of Southeast Asia, north for yards in southern Brazil, Chile or Peru. Avoid an aspect that a neighbouring shed shades all morning.
• Tilt. Set it steeper than the textbook optimum. Cement and haul-road dust builds into a film that costs more charge than the few degrees of tilt you give up, and a steeper panel lets rain wash it.
• Shade that arrives later. This is the yard-specific failure. The position is clear on install day; three months on a new steel stack or a double-stacked container sits between the panel and the sun. During the survey, ask the yard supervisor what is going to be stored there, not just what is there now.
• Wet season. Plan for a run of overcast days, not for a sunny one. Ask your supplier for the reserve figure for the exact model on the quotation rather than accepting one number for a whole series.

Add panel cleaning to the yard's routine maintenance, on the same cycle as stock counts. In a cement yard it is the highest-value maintenance minute you will spend.

Night imaging with no lighting anywhere

An unlit yard is not a problem for the right camera, but it forces an explicit choice between two night modes, and the wrong choice makes night footage useless.

The practical split in a yard: infrared on the narrating cameras — quiet and power-frugal — and spotlight only at the gate, where colour and plate detail carry the evidential weight. Lighting every position advertises the camera locations and spends the charge you were saving for the wet week.

Night-vision specification varies model by model across SolaGuard's 150 SKUs, so take the figures from the SKU on your quotation rather than generalising across a series.

AOV as a technical requirement, not a preference

AOV (Always-On Video) is an industry-generic term — not one company's brand — for keeping the sensor recording 24/7 at low standby power, with on-camera AI scene analysis deciding what to encode at full quality and what to hold at a baseline bitrate. In an open yard, three technical reasons put it ahead of PIR:

1. Distance. A PIR sensor measures thermal change within its cone. At the working distances of an open yard, someone moving slowly often produces no trigger at all.
2. Off-cone activity. People work the blind face of a stack — inside the camera's frame but outside the sensor's cone. PIR records nothing. AOV records it.
3. Discrepancies have no timestamp. When the month-end count is short by tonnes, you have no event to search for. You need to scrub a continuous timeline across many nights, which a trigger archive cannot give you.

The power-budget detail behind that behaviour is in the AOV solar camera guide.

Cellular signal at the far end, and storage

Test signal before you set the pole. The back of the yard is usually the weakest point — further from the mast, and screened by the steel and containers themselves. Walk to the exact position, at roughly the intended height, with handsets on two or three networks. Do not measure at the gate and extrapolate.

Storage. microSD up to 128 GB is standard; larger only on custom orders. Continuous recording consumes card space faster than event clips, so work backwards: how many days of retention do you need to cover one stock-count cycle? Fix that number, then set resolution and encoding to match. 1080p–2K is the standard range; 4K exists only as a custom or OEM build and shortens retention on the same card.

Sealing. Outdoor models are rated IP66 — dust-tight and resistant to powerful water jets, which matches monsoon rain and yard washdown. Treat any higher claim from any supplier as something to see certified.

Roll out in phases

The low-risk approach for a large yard:

1. Phase one — 10 units, the trial MOQ. One gate camera, two or three on the highest-value stacks, the rest wherever losses are suspected. Run it through a full wet season or one stock-count cycle.
2. Reconcile. Compare the count discrepancy against the recorded timeline. This is the step that tells you which positions are missing.
3. Phase two — extend. Dealer margin is 20% from around 10 units and 30% from around 50, and OEM or private label starts at 100. Samples ship 7–10 days by air, bulk 25–40 days by sea.

Hardware is built by Shenzhen Leksell — TÜV Rheinland certified, founded 2012, with CE, FCC and RoHS across the range. Browse the catalogue at /en/products/ and volume terms at /en/wholesale/.

Quantity, price and lead time always come from a person. Send a yard layout to +86 188 1869 9870 on WhatsApp or to info@solaguard.net with the yard's dimensions and where you think entry is happening.