Solar vs Wired CCTV for Farm Security When the Farm Already Has Electricity

Grid power at the farmhouse is not power at the fence line

If a farm already has electricity, wired CCTV is still the better buy for every camera within reach of an existing wall, roof or cable route — the yard, the machinery shed, the grain store, the main gate the mains already passes. Solar 4G wins everywhere a cable would have to be dug, poled or armoured: the far gate, the water point, the field perimeter, the pen at the end of the track, the seasonal pen that moves twice a year. The deciding variable is never "does this site have electricity". It is the cost and the disruption of running power and network to each individual camera position. On a working farm of any size the honest answer is a mixed site, and for a distributor that is the commercially useful conclusion: solar does not cannibalise the wired catalogue, it covers the positions a wired quote cannot win.

That matters because of how these deals are lost. An installer quotes eight cameras, six of them near buildings and two out at the boundary, and the two boundary positions carry most of the civil works in the quote. The farmer cuts those two, the perimeter stays dark, and the job that was supposed to stop theft protects the yard the farmer could already see from the kitchen window.

What the buyer is actually comparing

Not camera against camera. Install against install. Two cameras with identical sensors have completely different landed costs once the trench, the conduit, the switch port, the surge protection, the labour and the ground reinstatement are in the line items — and a trenched run is both a permanent asset and a permanent liability, because livestock, ploughs, rodents and subsidence all eventually find cable.

The practical test for a quote: measure from the nearest usable power point and the nearest usable network point to each proposed camera. Short runs inside an existing building are cheap and wired is the right answer. Anything that needs a new trench, a new pole line, or a wireless bridge with its own power problem at the far end is where solar 4G stops being a compromise and starts being the cheaper build.

Where wired genuinely still wins

Say this plainly to buyers, because installers will say it anyway and the ones who trust you are the ones you sold honestly to.

• Continuous high-bitrate recording from many cameras to one recorder, held on site for a long retention window. That is what an NVR and a hard disk are for, and no battery-powered camera does it better.
• Maximum resolution. The solar catalogue here is 1080p–2K as standard; 4K is available only as a custom or OEM build, so a customer who genuinely needs 4K at every position should be quoted accordingly rather than sold a stock SKU.
• Dense coverage with no per-camera airtime. Twenty cameras inside one building envelope means twenty SIMs and twenty data plans on the solar side. Cable wins that arithmetic.
• Anywhere without usable LTE coverage. Check signal at the actual mounting position before quoting, not at the farm gate. This is the single most common cause of a solar deployment underperforming, and it has nothing to do with the camera.

The objection installers raise — and the AOV answer

The standard argument against battery cameras is that they only record when a PIR sensor fires, so they miss slow movement, they miss anything outside the detection zone, and they miss the first seconds of an event while the camera wakes. On a farm that is a real failure: cattle drift, a person walking a boundary at a steady pace, a vehicle idling at the edge of the field.

AOV — Always-On Video, an industry-generic term, not a brand feature — is the response. Instead of sleeping until a sensor trips, the camera records continuously at low standby power and uses AI scene analysis to decide what deserves full-rate capture and an alert. The result is a timeline with no holes in it, which is what makes battery cameras acceptable for evidential use rather than just deterrence. When a distributor is asked why solar costs more than the cheapest battery camera on the market, this is the answer.

What the AOV range actually is

Of a 150-SKU catalogue, 49 models are AOV across four series, with wholesale prices quoted per order. All are IP66 and 2K.

Sizing the two power classes

The 8000mAh/8W platform — for example SG-C41G-10T66-V1 or SG-D42G-10F66-V1 — suits positions with clear sky, moderate traffic and a normal alert load. The 20000mAh/15W platform, such as SG-D42G-15F66-V1, is what to quote for partial shade from trees or a barn roof, extended overcast or monsoon seasons, high-traffic gates that trigger constantly, and any position a technician does not want to revisit. The temptation is to quote the cheaper platform everywhere and let the customer discover the difference in the wet season. Don't; the service call costs more than the upgrade.

On-camera storage is microSD up to 128GB. For a site that needs longer retention than a card holds, plan the retention policy up front — offload, cloud, or a wired recorder for the building cluster — rather than promising a card capacity that does not exist. Full specifications for every variant are on the product pages.

Mounting and commissioning

Each camera goes up in 5–10 minutes: bracket, aim the panel, insert the SIM and the card, pair. No electrician, no trench permit, no coordination with the farm's working day. On a large boundary that is the entire labour saving, and it is why a two-person crew can commission a whole perimeter in an afternoon.

Sourcing terms

The cameras are built by Shenzhen Leksell, established 2012, TÜV Rheinland certified, with CE, FCC and RoHS. Trial MOQ is 10 units; OEM and ODM start at 100, and private label is available across the full range including all 49 AOV models. Dealer margin is 20% from around 10 units and 30% from around 50.

Lead times: samples 7–10 days by air, bulk 25–40 days by sea, and 7–10 business days inside Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh City office. For a distributor building a farm-security line, the sensible first order is a mixed trial — a handful of the 8W dual-lens units and two or three 15W units — deployed on one real farm that already has electricity, so the wired-versus-solar boundary gets drawn from that site's own cable costs rather than from a brochure. Wholesale pricing and dealer terms are set out separately, and quantity pricing and lead time for a specific configuration always come from a person, not a page.