Every Island winter delivers the same event: a windstorm rolls in off the Pacific, trees meet power lines, and neighbourhoods go dark — sometimes for an evening, sometimes for days in the harder-hit areas. It's exactly the moment you'd most like your security system working, and exactly the moment a badly designed one quits. Whether yours keeps protecting the house through an outage comes down to decisions made at install time: battery sizing, how the system communicates when the internet dies with the power, and what's keeping the recorder alive. Here's how each layer behaves in an outage, and how to design it deliberately.
Get a Free QuoteThe failure chain is worth understanding, because it's longer than most people think. When power drops, your internet usually drops with it — the modem and router are on wall power, and even if they weren't, the provider's neighbourhood equipment may be dark too. So a system that depends on your Wi-Fi loses its connection to you and to any monitoring at the same moment the house goes dark.
Each component then lives or dies on its own backup. A proper alarm panel switches to its internal battery seamlessly. Cameras powered over ethernet die with the recorder unless the recorder's power is backed up. Wi-Fi cameras with internal batteries may keep recording locally but can't reach you without internet. The design question is simply: which of those behaviours did you buy? Most people find out during their first storm.
Alarm panels carry backup batteries as standard, and the meaningful question is hours. A panel's standby time depends on the battery fitted and the load hanging off it — sirens, keypads, powered sensors — so two identical panels can have very different autonomy. Common Island outages are restored within hours, but the big windstorms produce multi-day outages in pockets of the region nearly every winter, and battery sizing should acknowledge that.
The other half of autonomy is battery health. Backup batteries age whether or not they're ever used, and a battery that tested fine five years ago may hold minutes today. Panels typically flag a failing battery, but the honest safeguard is having batteries tested under load as part of routine servicing — before the storm season, not during it.
An alarm that can't report is a very expensive siren. The wet-coast answer is a cellular (LTE) communicator in the panel: a dedicated connection over the mobile network that carries alarm signals to the monitoring station — and status to your phone — when your internet is down. Cell towers have their own backup power, so cellular coverage routinely survives the neighbourhood outages that take residential internet down.
For monitored systems we treat cellular as the primary or backup path as a matter of course, with internet as the fast everyday channel. The combination means a storm that blacks out half of Saanich doesn't sever the connection between your house and the people watching it — the panel simply reports over LTE until the power and internet return.
Wired camera systems have a single point of failure in an outage: the recorder, which usually also powers the cameras over their network cables. Put the recorder and its network switch on an uninterruptible power supply — a battery unit that sits between the wall and the equipment — and the entire camera system rides through shorter outages, still recording, with no gap in the timeline.
How long depends on the UPS capacity and how many cameras it's carrying, which is a sizing exercise rather than a guess: we calculate the actual load and choose a unit for the autonomy you want. Add the internet modem and router to the same UPS and, for outages where the provider's network stays up, you keep remote viewing too. It's the single cheapest resilience upgrade most existing systems can make.
The scenario people actually care about: you're at work, the power's out at home, and you want to know the house is fine. A well-designed system answers from your cell phone — panel status over the cellular path, cameras over a UPS-backed connection where the internet survives, and event history filling in anything you missed. If checking your system mid-outage has never worked for you, that's a design gap, not a fact of life.
Security backup belongs on the same practical list as the flashlights and the water jugs — Islanders already prepare for storm season, and this is one more line item. Before winter: have panel and detector batteries checked, test the cellular path, confirm the UPS holds its rated load, and know how to check the app during an outage before you're doing it for the first time in the dark. None of it is dramatic. All of it is the difference between a system that works in a storm and one that merely works in a demo.
Tell us about your property and we'll come back with practical options and honest pricing.