How to Size Panels and Batteries for 4G/LTE Setups
A cellular solar security camera looks deceptively simple: no Wi-Fi, no power cable, just a camera, a small solar panel and a battery. From the outside, it feels like magic.
From a power perspective, it is anything but magic. A 4G/LTE modem draws more energy than Wi-Fi, signal quality is often worse at remote sites, and every truck roll to a failed camera costs time and money.
This guide focuses on the power side of solar powered cellular security cameras so you can size the system once and stop worrying about it:
- How they differ from Wi-Fi solar cameras.
- How to estimate real energy use in Wh/day.
- How to choose panel wattage and battery capacity.
- Practical configurations for farm gates, barns and construction sites.
1. Why cellular solar cameras are different from Wi-Fi
Both Wi-Fi and 4G/LTE cameras need energy to do the same three jobs:
- Stay connected (idle and heartbeat traffic).
- Capture images or video.
- Transmit data.
The difference is in how much and how often they use power to do those jobs.
For Wi-Fi solar cameras near a house or building:
- Wi-Fi signal is usually strong and stable.
- Data paths are short (router → internet).
- Average energy use might be in the 2–6 Wh/day range for a typical camera.
For 4G/LTE solar security cameras at remote gates, barns or yards:
- Signal may be weaker or variable, especially in valleys or behind trees.
- The modem must register, reconnect and sometimes retry transmissions.
- Each clip, snapshot or live view costs more energy than the same action over Wi-Fi.
As a result, the average daily energy use for a single 4G camera is often:
- 4–10 Wh/day for light to moderate use.
- 10–20+ Wh/day for busy scenes, frequent events and heavy IR at night.
Using a Wi-Fi-class 3–5 W panel for a 4G camera is one of the most common reasons systems die in winter. The radio behaves “normally”; the power budget does not.
2. Step 1 – Define the use case in simple numbers
Before you can size anything, capture three simple facts about your project. This turns “4G solar camera anywhere” into something you can design against.
Activity level. Is this a quiet farm gate with a handful of events per day, a busy construction entrance with trucks all day, or a vacation cabin driveway that only sees traffic on weekends? A quiet lane and a logistics yard can be an order of magnitude apart in Wh/day.
How you use the camera. Some systems only send motion alerts and short clips. Others push regular check-in snapshots to a dashboard, or support frequent live view sessions from a phone. The more “real-time” your workflow feels, the more time the modem spends awake.
Required autonomy. Decide how many days the system must survive poor sun without a visit. Is two bad days acceptable? Three? A week? For remote sites, the answer is rarely “one”.
Once you write those down, you can make an engineering statement like:
“We expect about 8 Wh/day use and want 3 days of autonomy.”
From here on, those two numbers (Wh/day and days of autonomy) drive everything else.
3. Step 2 – Estimate daily energy use (Wh/day)
You rarely get perfect log data at the planning stage, but you can stay in the right ballpark with realistic bands.
For a single cellular solar security camera on its own panel and battery:
- Low-activity site (few events, short clips): about 4–6 Wh/day.
- Moderate activity (typical gate / yard): about 6–10 Wh/day.
- Heavy-use or long-clip site: 10–20+ Wh/day.
If you are developing your own device, the gold standard is to instrument a prototype and measure Wh/day over at least a week. If you use third-party cameras, choose the closest band and err on the high side instead of designing for a best-case day.
Many OEM teams test their power budget using off-the-shelf modules from our Mini Solar Panels collection, then move to custom modules once those measurements are stable.
4. Step 3 – Size the solar panel for the worst month
Use the same simple formula that works for other off-grid IoT systems:
Daily solar energy ≈ Panel_Watts × Effective_Sun_Hours × System_Efficiency
“Effective sun hours” is the same idea many resources call peak sun hours — the number of hours per day your site receives the equivalent of 1,000 W/m² of full sun. It lets you collapse a whole daylight curve into a single planning number.
For most temperate sites, conservative winter design values are:
- Effective winter sun: about 2–4 h/day in the worst month, depending on latitude and climate.
- System efficiency (controller + wiring + battery): roughly 50–70%.
Example – medium-use 4G camera
Assume:
- Energy use: 8 Wh/day.
- Sun hours (worst month): 3 h/day.
- Efficiency: 60%.
Required panel watts:
8 ÷ (3 × 0.6) ≈ 4.4 W
On paper, a 5 W panel might work. In reality, you know that life happens:
- Dust, bird droppings and partial shading cut output.
- Bad signal days keep the modem awake longer.
- Battery performance drops in cold weather and as it ages.
So in practice, for this “medium” 4G use, a panel in the 8–12 W range is far more reliable. In harsher climates or higher usage, 15–20 W per camera is common.
This is exactly where LinkSolar mini and small panels are designed to operate: rugged 5–20 W class modules that can be tuned to a camera’s real energy profile rather than a brochure number. For low-power devices and prototypes, that usually means starting in the Mini Solar Panels collection and moving up as the design matures.
5. Step 4 – Choose a battery for bad weeks, not good days
The battery is your buffer. It quietly carries the system through:
- Night-time operation when there is no sun.
- Cloudy or rainy days.
- Spikes in data use and extra live views.
Two numbers matter most:
- Daily Wh (from the previous step).
- Days of autonomy you want the system to survive with minimal charging.
Continuing the 8 Wh/day example with 3 days autonomy:
Required usable energy ≈ 8 × 3 = 24 Wh
You then translate this into nominal battery capacity, accounting for chemistry and acceptable depth of discharge (DoD) — the percentage of the battery you are willing to use in normal operation.
As a rough rule of thumb:
- Lead-acid batteries are often sized for about 50% DoD in regular use.
- LiFePO₄ and other lithium packs are comfortable at 70–80% DoD when designed correctly.
In our 24 Wh usable example, that might translate into 30–40 Wh nominal of lithium battery so you are not cycling to 0% every cloudy stretch. In colder climates or mission-critical sites, you would add more headroom.
Once you have several cameras or extra devices (routers, sensors, beacons), it is usually better to sum their Wh/day and design one shared battery bank rather than lots of tiny packs. That is the same pattern we use on compact masts and enclosures in our Solar for Weather Stations & Environmental Monitoring projects, where multiple sensors ride on a single solar/battery stack.
6. Step 5 – Typical configurations that work in practice
6.1 Farm gate or remote driveway (no Wi-Fi)
Picture a single 4G camera at a gate or lane. It mostly sends motion alerts and a few live views per day. Site visits are annoying but possible.
Design baseline:
- 8–15 W panel, placed with a clear view of the sky and minimal winter shading.
- 30–40 Wh battery for roughly 3–4 days of autonomy at moderate activity.
- Separate mounting for camera and panel so you can aim each independently.
For poles and posts, many teams use a small adjustable bracket such as LinkSolar’s Universal Solar Panel Pole Mount Kit (5–50 W), then clamp the camera separately at the correct height. That avoids the usual compromise where the camera has a great view but the panel looks at a nearby tree.
6.2 Remote barn or construction entrance (multi-camera)
Now imagine a remote barn or construction entrance with two or three cameras plus a 4G router or bridge. Here the cameras are closer together, and it becomes painful to maintain separate tiny systems.
Instead of treating each camera as its own off-grid system, treat everything on the pole as one solar power system:
- Add up the Wh/day for all cameras and the router.
- Design a small pole-mount solar kit with roughly 100–300 W of panels, depending on load, climate and expansion plans.
- Feed cameras and router from a shared battery bank using DC distribution or PoE.
Mechanically, this looks very similar to a compact monitoring mast: one or two framed modules on dedicated solar panel pole mounts, an enclosure at chest height, and short labeled DC runs into the box. The same mounting language shows up in our weather station and marine projects, because the physics is identical even if the payload changes.
6.3 Solar cellular trail camera or wildlife camera
For wildlife, livestock or boundary monitoring, the duty cycle is usually low: the camera sleeps most of the time and only wakes briefly to record and send clips.
Design baseline:
- 3–7 W mini panel (or a small group of mini panels) paired with a 20–40 Wh battery, depending on climate and trigger rate.
- Compact bracket or integrated housing so the panel and camera move as one piece.
In this class, designers often start with rugged glass-front modules from our Mini Solar Panels range, or flexible thin-film parts from the Flexible Amorphous Silicon Solar Panel line when they need something that can curve around a housing. For wiring details on mini modules, see our step-by-step guide on how to connect mini solar panels safely.
Across all three scenarios, LinkSolar supplies both mini panels for single devices and larger pole-mount configurations for multi-camera sites, so integrators can reuse the same proven patterns across many installations instead of reinventing the stack on every project.
7. When to move from kits to custom OEM solutions
Off-the-shelf solar camera kits are perfectly fine when you are:
- Running small trials and proof-of-concepts.
- Doing one-off installations at homes or very small sites.
They start to fall short when you:
- Deploy dozens or hundreds of cellular solar cameras across a region.
- Have mixed loads (cameras + routers + sensors + beacons) on a single pole.
- Need consistent mechanical and electrical design across many locations and years.
In those cases, working with a specialist OEM like LinkSolar lets you treat the solar hardware as part of your product, not an afterthought:
- Tune panel wattage, voltage window and form factor to your camera platform rather than forcing the camera to adapt to a generic panel.
- Integrate panels with custom brackets, enclosures and poles so the system looks intentional, not cobbled together.
- Standardise cables and connectors so installers see the same kit and color-coding every time.
Many OEM customers follow a simple path:
- Prototype with catalog parts from the Mini Solar Panels, Solar Cells and Solar Panel Brackets & Mounts ranges.
- Collect real Wh/day, modem behavior and site shading data over a season.
- Translate what worked into a tailored module and mounting set through the Custom Solar Panels program.
You still own the camera, firmware and overall system design. LinkSolar simply provides the solar “building blocks” that keep your 4G cameras online in the field — long after a generic 10 W kit would have given up.
