Load shedding and your security cameras

During load shedding most home CCTV is simply off — and worse, the owner usually doesn't realise it. Here is what keeps running, what it costs, and how to tell.

What actually goes down

People assume the cameras are the problem. Usually they are the least of it. A typical home system loses power in this order:

1. The router / fibre ONT — without it there is no remote viewing and no notifications, even if everything else runs.
2. The network switch or PoE injector — PoE cameras are powered by the switch, so this kills the cameras too.
3. The DVR/NVR — recording stops.
4. The cameras themselves — if separately powered.

The practical consequence: an unprotected system is blind and silent for the whole slot, and there is no record of the period when a property is arguably at its most vulnerable — dark, and with the neighbourhood's alarms and gate motors down too.

What a small UPS actually covers

The good news is that this equipment draws very little. A modest UPS or inverter — the kind many households already bought for the router — will typically carry:

Device	Rough draw	Notes
Fibre ONT + router	10–20 W	The critical one for any alerting
8-port PoE switch (4 cameras)	25–40 W	Scales with camera count
DVR/NVR with one drive	15–30 W	Spinning disk is most of it
Small AI detection box	6–15 W	Idles low, peaks while analysing

Total for a typical four-camera home with alerting: roughly 60–100 W. A 600–1000 VA UPS will usually carry that comfortably through a two-and-a-half hour slot, and a modest inverter/battery setup will do it repeatedly without thought.

Two practical notes. First, put everything on the same protected supply — cameras without a router still cannot tell you anything. Second, batteries age; a UPS that carried you for three hours two years ago may manage forty minutes now, and you will only discover that during an incident.

The failure nobody plans for: silent blindness

The genuinely dangerous scenario is not the outage. It is the outage that doesn't end properly — a camera that doesn't come back after power returns, a router that reconnects but with a new address, a recorder stuck at boot. The system appears fine. The app opens. Nobody notices that one camera has been showing a frozen frame since Tuesday.

The most dangerous state for any alarm is not "off". It is "off, while everyone believes it is on".

Whatever system you use, ask one question: does it tell me when it stops working? If a monitoring system has not heard from your cameras in ten minutes, it should say so, out loud, on your phone. Silence should never be indistinguishable from safety.

A sensible load-shedding checklist

1. Put the router, switch and recorder on one UPS, not just the router.
2. Test the actual runtime once a year — run it on battery and time it.
3. If you use LTE as backup internet, confirm it fails over on battery too.
4. After each long outage, check that every camera came back — not just that the app opens.
5. Choose alerting that notifies you when it goes offline, so step 4 happens automatically.