Keep Your Security Cameras Recording When the Power or NBN Goes Down

When the power drops or the NBN falls over, most home camera systems quietly stop doing their job. The cameras lose power, the router loses power, and even if the cameras have their own batteries, the cloud upload has nowhere to go. Storms are exactly when you'd want the footage.

The good news is that a camera setup only draws a handful of watts. Keeping it alive through a typical outage is one of the cheaper resilience projects in a smart home — if you back up the right things in the right order.

First, work out which failure you're solving

Blackouts and internet outages look similar from the app, but they need different fixes.

Mains power loss. Everything goes: cameras, PoE switch, NVR, modem, router, Wi-Fi mesh nodes. Even battery cameras go dark in practice, because the Wi-Fi they talk to is gone.

Internet loss with power intact. Cameras and local recording keep working. What you lose is remote viewing and push notifications — and, on cloud-only cameras, the recordings themselves.

Partial NBN failures. On FTTP, the nbn connection box in your house needs mains power to work. Some older installations have a battery back-up unit, but nbn stopped offering new ones from June 2024. The feature was also designed around keeping voice services running in a power outage rather than your home network. On FTTC, the connection box inside your home powers the service, so it drops out with your power. On FTTN, FTTB, HFC and fixed wireless, nbn says services won't work during a power outage in its network or at your premises. That means a street-level or tower outage you can't control can take you offline too. Either way, assume your connection is down the moment your house is.

Work out which of these worries you most, because the answer changes what you buy.

Back up the network before you back up the cameras

This is the step people skip. A camera with a charged battery and no working Wi-Fi is a camera that records nothing you can see.

The priority order for backup power is:

1. NBN NTD / modem — the box the line terminates in
2. Router and any mesh node the cameras associate with
3. PoE switch and NVR, if you run wired cameras
4. The cameras themselves, if they're mains or PoE powered

How much a modem-plus-router pair draws depends entirely on the models, so measure it rather than guess. A plug-in energy meter or the UPS's own load display will show the real figure. The rating printed on each power adapter is a maximum, not typical draw. Do the same with a PoE switch and its cameras, since the total climbs with every camera and any infrared or spotlight in use at night. Network gear is usually a modest load, which is why a small UPS can go a surprisingly long way.

Consumer UPS units in the 650–1000VA class are widely stocked in Australia. At the time of writing, for example, JB Hi-Fi listed a CyberPower 650VA line-interactive unit at $129 and a CyberPower 1000VA line-interactive unit at $259. Officeworks listed a CyberPower 650VA unit at $129. Prices change, so check before you buy. Runtime depends on your measured load, the battery's size and its age. Find your load on the manufacturer's runtime chart rather than relying on the VA number on the box — VA is a headline figure, not a promise of hours. CyberPower itself notes its published runtimes are approximate and vary with battery age, charge level and environment, so test yours (see the checklist below).

One caveat worth knowing: many cheaper UPS units output a stepped (simulated) sine wave on battery — the CyberPower 1000VA model above is one. CyberPower says equipment with an active power factor correction (PFC) power supply requires a pure sine wave source. Check the power supply specs of anything you plan to connect, or choose a pure sine wave UPS if you're unsure.

A small desktop UPS is best suited to the network gear alone. Add an NVR and a string of PoE cameras and the load climbs, so the same unit covers a much shorter outage. That's fine for a flicker or a brief drop, less so for a long storm outage. If the runtime chart shows minutes rather than hours at your load, that's the case for a power station.

Portable power stations: longer runtime, more flexibility

If your area cops multi-hour outages — bushfire season, storm season, rural feeders — a lithium power station gives far more headroom than a UPS. You can use it for the fridge or phone charging once the cameras are sorted.

The practical maths is simple. Divide the unit's usable watt-hours by your measured load in watts, then allow for inverter losses and the unit's own consumption, which vary by model — check the manufacturer's stated efficiency or runtime estimate. As a worked example, a 500Wh unit running a 25W load gives 20 hours on paper (500 ÷ 25), and real-world runtime will be shorter once those losses are counted. That covers almost any suburban outage.

The specification implies a camera like this will keep detecting and recording locally to its hub for as long as the battery lasts, but the value of that depends entirely on where footage is stored. If your system is cloud-only, an internet outage means events are detected, uploaded to nothing, and in some cases discarded. Check whether your cameras or hub support local storage — microSD, USB drive or an internal disk — and turn it on. That single setting is often the difference between "we lost the night of the break-in" and a usable file.

Two caveats. A microSD card inside the camera is cheap insurance, but it leaves with the camera if someone pulls it off the wall. Where you can, record to a hub or recorder kept somewhere less exposed and treat the card as a second copy. And on some ecosystems, local or hub storage and the features around it depend on the subscription tier, which can change, so check the current plan inclusions for your model before relying on it. Whichever you choose, the hub or recorder needs to be on backup power too; battery cameras paired with a backed-up hub are what survive a blackout end to end. If you are weighing up hub-based systems, our comparison of Reolink and Eufy cameras breaks down how both brands handle local storage and subscriptions.

Home Assistant users have an advantage here: an RTSP-capable camera recording to a local NVR (Frigate, Scrypted, Blue Iris or similar) on a UPS keeps recording regardless of what the NBN is doing. The internet only affects your ability to watch it from the pub.

Local recording doesn't change what your cameras are allowed to capture. The OAIC notes that the Privacy Act doesn't cover a security camera operated by an individual acting in a private capacity, but state or territory laws may apply. If a camera takes in a neighbour's property, shared areas or audio, check the rules with your state or territory, and if you rent, check your lease and your state's tenancy authority too.

Add a mobile failover path for alerts

Backup power keeps the gear alive; it doesn't restore your internet connection. For alerts to reach your phone during an NBN outage you need a second path.

• Router with 4G/5G failover. Many mid-range routers accept a SIM or a USB modem and switch automatically. A cheap prepaid data SIM costs very little to keep active, and camera alerts use minimal data — full-quality video streaming does not, so cap the quality while on mobile.
• A standalone 4G/5G modem. Cheaper if your router has no SIM slot, but it won't take over automatically unless your router supports dual WAN failover; otherwise you're swapping cables by hand.
• A phone hotspot. Free, manual, and requires you to be home and awake. Better than nothing.
• Mobile-connected cameras. Some models take their own SIM. Useful at sheds and rural properties with no fixed line.

Also confirm your mobile coverage indoors. If the same storm has knocked out the local mobile tower's backhaul, no amount of failover helps. Towers have limited reserves of their own in a wide-area blackout, too. Telstra says most of its sites have batteries that typically provide between 3 and 12 hours of backup power. After that, a site goes offline unless mains power returns or another power source is available. Beyond that point, local recording is what keeps your footage.

Know when the power goes out, and when it comes back

A small but genuinely useful addition: a smart plug on a non-critical circuit acts as a power sentinel. Because your router is on backup power and the plug isn't, the plug dropping offline while the network stays up is a clear sign the mains has gone. You can automate a notification from that event in Home Assistant, or in the vendor app if it offers offline alerts. When mains returns, it reconnects and reports online, so you also know how long the house was without power, which is handy if you're away and wondering about the fridge.

Some smart plugs also have a configurable power-on state, which matters if you want a device to come back up automatically rather than staying off after an outage. Worth checking that setting on anything you rely on.

A practical setup checklist

• Put the NTD, modem and router on the UPS or power station first, before the cameras.
• Measure the actual load with an energy meter or the UPS display, then calculate runtime honestly.
• Enable local recording on every camera or hub that supports it.
• Configure 4G/5G failover and test it by unplugging the WAN cable, not by assuming.
• Twice a year, pull the plug on the UPS and time how long the network stays up, then check the recorder or hub actually kept recording through the test. Schneider Electric (APC) puts the typical life of sealed lead-acid (VRLA) UPS batteries at three to five years, and lithium-ion at eight to ten, with heat and power quality shortening it. Check your model's documentation.
• Note which cameras are cloud-dependent, and treat those as bonus coverage rather than your primary record.

Do those six things and a blackout becomes an inconvenience rather than a blind spot.