Solar Cameras That Record 24/7: What Actually Delivers Continuous Video, and What to Specify

Yes — but only the AOV class of solar camera does it

A solar 4G camera can record 24/7, and the ones that do are sold under the industry-generic label AOV — Always-On Video. An AOV camera keeps the sensor and encoder alive continuously at low standby power, using on-device AI scene analysis to decide what to encode at full quality and what to hold at minimum bitrate, instead of sleeping until a PIR sensor trips. Ordinary solar cameras are PIR-triggered: they are asleep by default, wake on a heat-and-motion event, and record a clip. That is a fundamentally different product, and for a buyer it is the single most important line item on the spec sheet. In SolaGuard's 150-SKU catalogue, 49 models are AOV, with wholesale prices quoted per order. Everything outside that group is event-triggered and will not give a customer continuous footage no matter how the listing is worded.

AOV is not a brand term and no factory owns it. If a supplier presents "AOV" as a proprietary feature, that tells you something about the supplier rather than the technology.

Why PIR gaps become warranty complaints

PIR misses three things reliably, and every one of them turns into an end-user dispute that lands back on the distributor:

• Slow movement. Someone walking a fence line at a shallow angle produces almost no apparent heat-front travel across the sensor. The camera stays asleep.
• Out-of-zone events. PIR has a narrower effective cone than the lens. Activity is in frame, in focus, and unrecorded.
• Ambient heat. In the Mekong Delta or coastal Colombia, a sun-soaked metal gate at midday narrows the differential PIR depends on. Detection range shortens exactly when your customer needs it.

AOV removes the class of complaint entirely, because there is no trigger to miss. The trade-off moves to power and storage, which is an engineering problem you can specify around — unlike "the camera didn't see it."

The power budget is the product

Continuous encoding draws power around the clock, so an AOV camera lives or dies on its battery and panel pairing. This is where padded datasheets do the most damage: a buyer quotes a headline battery figure to their customer, and the replacement claims start in the second rainy season.

The four AOV series and what each actually ships with:

That is the whole AOV range — 49 SKUs, no higher battery, no larger panel. Standard resolution across the line is 1080p–2K; 4K exists only as a custom/OEM build, not as a stock item you can pull from a container.

Choosing between the 8000mAh and 20000mAh tiers

The honest way to frame this for your customer is by recharge conditions, not by feature tier:

• 8000mAh / 8W suits sites with clear southern (or northern, below the equator) sky, no canopy, and a mounting position you can angle properly. Open farmland, yard perimeters, rooftop installs, pole-mounted parking coverage.
• 20000mAh / 15W — the SG-D42G-15F66-V* series — is what you specify for shaded or cloud-heavy sites: plantation edges, tree-lined ranch boundaries, monsoon-season Vietnam, Andean and Amazonian installs with long overcast runs. The bigger panel recharges faster in weak light, and the larger cell carries a longer deficit.

Under-specifying here is the most expensive mistake in the category. A camera that browns out for six hours a day is not a 24/7 camera, and the customer does not blame the weather. SG-D42G-15F66-V1 and SG-D42G-10F66-V1 make a useful pair for a demo kit — same dual-lens 2K imaging, different power class, so a prospect can see what the higher power class buys.

Storage and retention: set expectations before the first container

Continuous recording consumes card capacity far faster than event clips do, and this is where a distributor's after-sales load is decided. Onboard storage is microSD up to 128GB as standard, with larger capacities available on custom orders. Plan every deployment around three layers rather than pretending the card alone is the archive:

1. Onboard card — rolling local buffer with overwrite. Sized for the recent window, not for months.
2. AI-flagged events — the footage anyone actually retrieves. Person, vehicle and animal detections get marked and pulled first.
3. Cloud or app-side retention — where evidence needing to survive an insurance claim or a police report should sit.

Sell that structure explicitly. A buyer told "records 24/7" who then assumes 24/7 means "keeps everything forever" will come back angry, and you will be the one absorbing it.

Ingress rating across all 49 AOV models is IP66 — dust-tight and protected against powerful water jets, which covers monsoon rain, Andean hail and coastal salt spray with correct gland sealing. It is not an immersion rating; any site that floods needs a higher-rated enclosure or a higher mounting point. Installation runs 5–10 minutes per camera — pole bracket, angle the panel, insert the SIM and card — which matters when a customer is commissioning forty units across a plantation with no trenching and no electrician.

Sourcing terms for continuous-recording units

SolaGuard is the wholesale brand of Shenzhen Leksell, established 2012, TÜV Rheinland certified, with CE, FCC and RoHS on the product side, and a Vietnam office in Ho Chi Minh City. The commercial structure for AOV is identical to the rest of the catalogue:

OEM and private label are available on all models, including every one of the 49 AOV SKUs: your logo on the housing, your branding in the app, your packaging and manual in Vietnamese, Spanish or English. At 100 units the tooling economics work; below that, a trial order of 10 in factory branding is the sensible way to validate the power class against your actual climate before committing.

What to verify before you commit

Run these against any supplier, including this one:

• Is continuous recording actually continuous, or "smart" scheduled? Some listings call scheduled-window recording 24/7. Ask for the duty cycle in writing.
• Which battery and panel ship with the exact SKU quoted? Series-level specs get generalised in quotes. Confirm at model-number level — a dual-lens SG-D42G-10F66 and a dual-lens SG-D42G-15F66 look alike in a photo and differ by 8000mAh versus 20000mAh and 8W versus 15W.
• What is the local-SIM and band situation? A 4G camera is only as good as its carrier coverage in the province you are selling into.
• Who handles a DOA in month three? Get the replacement policy before the PO, not after.

Full specifications for all 49 AOV models sit on the product catalogue, and pricing at your volume, sample terms and OEM scope come from a person rather than a page — start at wholesale enquiries or by email to info@solaguard.net. Quantity, unit price and lead time for a specific configuration are always quoted directly; anything a website tells you about your own volume pricing is a guess.