Do Security Cameras Work Without Power?

The short answer

A battery camera keeps working. A wired camera does not. But the question people are really asking is will it still be recording when the lights come back on, and that has a different answer, because a power cut usually takes your router with it.

So there are two dependencies, not one:

Power — solved by batteries, and solved very comfortably. Blink publishes two AA lithium cells rated for up to two years in the Outdoor 4. eufy builds a solar panel into the eufyCam S330. Reolink sells a solar panel for the Argus PT Ultra. None of these is going to be defeated by a four-hour outage.

Somewhere to put the footage — solved only by local storage. A camera that saves to the cloud needs the internet, and your internet is on the same grid as your lights. Ring’s cameras have no local storage option at all, so a battery Ring camera in an outage can see perfectly well and has nowhere to put what it sees.

The combination that survives is therefore battery or solar power plus local storage. Two of the cameras we cover do exactly that.

What each camera does when the power goes out

The Reolink is the cleanest answer on the page: battery, solar, and a card inside the camera, so nothing in your house needs to be alive for it to keep working. The eufy is nearly as good and better in one way — the footage is indoors on a HomeBase rather than on the wall where the camera is — with the caveat that the HomeBase is a mains device, so it belongs on the same small UPS as your router.

The Blink is the interesting middle case. The camera itself will outlast any outage on its AA cells, but local footage goes to a Sync Module indoors, which needs power. And the Ring row is the one that surprises people: a camera can have a fully charged battery and still record nothing, because the recording happens somewhere else.

The router is the weak link

If you only fix one thing after reading this, fix the router.

A small uninterruptible power supply holding the modem, the router and any base station is the cheapest way to turn a power cut from an outage into an inconvenience. It keeps remote viewing alive, keeps a cloud camera able to upload, and keeps a hub reporting. For a wired camera that records to a card, putting the camera’s own supply on the same UPS keeps it capturing through the whole event.

Note what this does not fix: if the outage has also taken out the broadband at the exchange or the street cabinet, your UPS keeps the equipment alive and the connection is still down. That is the scenario local storage is for, and the reason we keep recommending it — documented in full in do security cameras need Wi-Fi? and smart home without internet.

Alarms handle this better than cameras

Worth knowing if an outage is a serious concern for you rather than a curiosity, because alarm makers design for it explicitly and camera makers mostly do not.

Ring publishes an up-to-24-hour backup battery in the base station of its 8-piece Alarm kit, and notes that cellular backup, professional monitoring and hands-free Alexa arming require a subscription. SimpliSafe publishes network backup and up to 24 hours of battery on its base station, with agents available 24/7 to request dispatch. That combination — battery in the panel plus a cellular path off the property — is what keeps a system reporting when both the power and the broadband are gone, and no camera we cover offers it.

If that is the requirement, you are shopping for an alarm rather than a camera: best home security systems and DIY vs professional monitoring are the pages that cover it properly.

One honest limitation of battery cameras

They do not record continuously, in an outage or out of one. eufy states that a battery-operated camera will not record continuously even when connected to a HomeBase, and TP-Link states that its battery-powered cameras and doorbells do not support continuous recording. A battery camera wakes on motion, records a clip and goes back to sleep — which is what makes months of runtime possible.

So the camera that keeps running through a power cut is, by design, the camera that only captures events. If you want every minute, you want a wired camera on a battery backup, which is a different plan with different hardware. Our guide to whether cameras record all the time covers the trade, and how long cameras keep footage covers what happens to it afterwards.

The cameras that keep working

Three cameras, drawn from our wireless and battery ranking, all with no monthly fee.

If the reason you are reading this is a building with no power at all rather than an occasional outage — a detached garage, a shed, a gate — the right page is the best security cameras for a garage, which ranks these same cameras on exactly that problem.