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Solar CCTV cameras
Solar-powered security cameras that run with no mains supply — a panel and a battery sized for the Chennai monsoon, not a sunny afternoon, reaching your phone over WiFi or a 4G SIM. Installed across Chennai and Tamil Nadu.
No mainsNo trenching
01 · Harvests
The panel
A 30–40 W panel angled to the Chennai sun, not the 8–10 W square bundled with a budget kit
02 · 4 days dark
The battery
Sized to ride out the overcast run of the October monsoon — four dark days, not a sunny afternoon
03 · 3–5 MP
The camera
Low-power PIR standby configured, not left on default. It sips between events and records to its own card
04 · Anywhere
Your phone
Alerts and live view over WiFi where there is broadband, over a 4G SIM where there is not
The panel is the easy part — the battery is the one that fails
No mains
a panel instead of a wire
4 days
typical backup with no sun
30–40 W
the panel we default to, not 10
Start here
Marketplace listings show you the product price and nothing else. What they do not show is everything that keeps the camera charged, mounted and still there a year later.
This is the number the marketplace listing shows you — a box with a camera in it, and nothing else.
The listing rarely includes one. Recording needs a surveillance-rated card sized for the days you actually want to keep.
A wall mount is the simple case. A 10–12 ft galvanised pole set in concrete on a plot boundary is not, and it is what most open-ground positions need.
Sealed glands, a junction box and an earth on anything standing in open ground. Skipping this is why cameras die in the first monsoon.
A remote site is a day, not an hour. This is the line every online listing leaves you to solve yourself, and the reason most DIY kits end up remounted.
Not every line applies to every site. A wall with broadband in reach loses the pole and needs only a small panel. We itemise all of it on the quotation precisely so you can see what you are paying for — including buying the camera yourself and having us install and power it, which some customers do and which we are happy to quote.
Before you buy
Solar earns its cost wherever running power to the camera would cost more than a panel — which is most farms, plots and boundaries. Where a socket is already in reach, mains power and a short spur beat a panel and a battery on both price and maintenance.
A field, a plot boundary, a pump house, a gate a hundred metres from the nearest meter. Where running power costs more than a panel, solar is not the compromise — it is the cheaper answer.
No power and no broadband. Solar makes the camera independent of the mains, and a 4G SIM makes it independent of the router — the two together are the only thing that covers a bare plot at all.
A construction site, an event ground, a project office. Nothing is trenched in, and at handover the whole installation unbolts, panel and all, and goes to the next site.
A second house, an inherited plot, a shuttered unit. Solar means no EB connection to keep live and no bill for a building nobody is in — and a motion alert on your phone the moment somebody walks the compound.
A far corner of a compound, a boundary across open ground. Digging a power run to one camera can cost more than the camera, the panel and the battery put together.
Then mains power and a short spur cost less to fit and nothing to maintain. A panel and a battery on a wall that has a plug point beside it is money spent avoiding a wire you did not need to avoid.
Continuous 4K recording, or a PTZ motor patrolling all night, can draw more than a panel replaces in a Chennai October. Those positions want mains, or a much larger panel priced accordingly.
A covered car park, a north wall in a narrow gap between buildings, a position under a dense canopy. No battery compensates for a panel that never sees the sun — and we will say so before quoting it.
Power is only half the question
A solar camera still has to reach your phone, and how it does that depends on one thing: whether the site has broadband. Solar pairs with either, and the right pairing is usually obvious once you know which the site has.
The site has broadband, but no socket where the camera has to go — a far gate, a boundary wall, a porch across the compound. The camera joins your existing WiFi and needs no SIM, so there is nothing monthly to pay. This is the cheaper case, and the one most homes and compounds are.
WiFi CCTV camerasNo power and no broadband — a farm, a plot, a bare site. The camera carries its own 4G SIM and reaches you over the mobile network, surveyed for signal at the mount point before the pole goes up. Solar and the SIM together are the only thing that covers a site with nothing at all.
CCTV camera with a SIM cardWhat you are buying
Failures on solar installations are almost never the camera. They are a panel too small for the monsoon and a battery too small for a cloudy week — the two lines a marketplace listing is quietest about. So those get sized as carefully as the optics do.
3 MP covers a gate, a yard or a shed front. 5 MP and dual-lens units are for positions where you need to read a plate or track someone across open ground — and they draw more, which the panel and battery then have to be sized up to carry.
The panel bundled with a cheap kit is sized for a sunny week. Ours is sized for the run of overcast days Chennai gets in October and November, and it is angled and oriented on site rather than bolted flat to whatever was convenient.
This is the part that decides whether the camera survives a cloudy spell, and the part no marketplace listing quotes the capacity of. We size the cell for four dark days as standard, and larger where the site is one you visit rarely.
Most solar positions are not walls. A pole in open ground has to survive wind, cattle and somebody leaning a ladder on it, and it has to be tall enough that neither the camera nor the panel is the first thing a trespasser reaches.
Solar solves power; it does not solve the network. The camera reaches your phone over your WiFi where there is broadband on site, or over a 4G SIM where there is not. Either way the footage records to a card in the camera, which costs nothing to fill.
Days without sun
The number that matters is not the panel's wattage — it is how many days the camera runs when the sun does not come out at all. This is what each pairing gives a normal camera, and why the bundled kit goes dark first.
| Panel · battery | Typical camera | Days no sun | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 W · 20 Wh | Bundled budget kit | ~1 day | The panel and cell that ship free with a ₹3,000 camera. A sunny-week setup — the first long cloudy spell and it goes dark. |
| 20 W · 30 Wh | 3 MP fixed / pan-tilt | 2 – 3 days | Workable for a low-traffic gate in a bright, open position that gets sun most of the day. |
| 30 W · 40 Wh | 3 – 4 MP pan-tilt | 4 days | Our default. Sized for the overcast run of the October–December monsoon, not a clear February afternoon. |
| 40 W · 60 Wh | 5 MP / dual-lens | 6 – 7 days | For a heavier camera, a partly shaded roofline, or an owner who visits the site only now and then. |
| 60 W · 100 Wh | Dual-lens / 4G PTZ | 7+ days | Carries an auto-tracking or optical-zoom body through a full monsoon week with margin to spare. |
We size the pairing to the camera's real draw and to how often someone is on site to notice a problem — a plot you visit twice a year gets more margin than a gate you pass daily. The one thing we will not do is fit the 8–10 W panel a budget kit ships with and call it solar, because it is a fair-weather panel and Chennai has a monsoon.
What it costs
Camera, panel and battery only — memory card and installation are separate. The survey decides which unit each position needs.
A single-lens solar camera with panel and battery.
A gate, a boundary wall, a porch — one position that needs to run without power or WiFi.
Starting from ₹8,000
A dual-lens solar camera with panel and battery.
Where you need a wide view and a close-up from one mount — a yard, a compound, a farmhouse gate.
Starting from ₹9,500
A linkage solar camera set with panel and battery.
A multi-camera setup where the units talk to each other — a larger compound or a site with several positions.
Starting from ₹11,500
Camera, panel and battery only — memory card and installation are extra, and quoted separately after the survey. Whether the position needs a pole, how far the site is from the city and how much sun the panel will actually see move the final number more than the camera model does. The full Chennai price list covers the wired and wireless systems alongside these.
Where it goes
None of them has power where the camera has to go, and most have no broadband either. That is the whole qualification — everything else about these installations is a variation on pole height and panel size.
How we fit it
A single solar camera on a wall is a half-day. A pole set in concrete needs the concrete to cure, so that is two visits — and you get both dates with the quotation rather than after the first one.
The location and the sky matter more than the building here. A pin on a map lets us check both mobile coverage and roughly what sun the position gets before anybody drives out.
An engineer reads the sun path at each proposed mount — what shades it and when — and, where there is no broadband, the cellular signal on more than one operator. That is what sizes the panel and decides the position.
Camera, panel, battery, pole, weatherproofing, connectivity, labour and travel, each on its own line, so you can see exactly where the difference from a marketplace listing goes.
Pole set and earthed, panel angled and oriented against the real sun, camera aimed against the real light, low-power modes configured, detection zones drawn to exclude the public road.
App configured on every phone that needs it, admin to the owner, viewer roles for everyone else, strong passwords set. We show you playback and clip export before we leave.
Questions
From the location we can tell you what sun the position gets and whether it has a signal, and from there what panel and battery it needs to run through the monsoon. If solar is the right answer, the survey and the itemised quotation are free. If a wire is cheaper, you will hear that instead.