How We Keep POS and CCTV Running Through a KPLC Blackout

A power cut in the middle of trading is not an IT emergency if you planned for it. It becomes one when the till is dead, the cameras are blind, and nobody can take a payment for the twenty minutes it takes KPLC to come back. The goal is not to power the whole building. It is to keep the few things that make you money alive long enough to ride out a typical outage.

Decide what actually needs to survive

Most businesses waste money trying to back up everything, then run out of budget before covering the essentials. Split your equipment into three buckets:

• Must stay on: the POS terminal, the network switch and router, the internet connection, and the security recorder. This is the short list that keeps you trading and protected.
• Nice to have: office desktops, printers, screens. Useful, but the business does not stop if they blink off.
• Ignore: lighting, kettles, air conditioning, anything with a heating element. These drain a battery in minutes and belong on a generator if you need them at all.

Size your backup around bucket one. Everything else is a separate conversation.

The forgotten piece: your internet dies with the power

Here is the mistake we see most. A shop puts the POS tablet on a UPS, feels covered, and then the power cuts and the cloud POS still stops working. Why? The fibre ONT (the small box your provider installed) and the router lost power. The till has battery, but it has nothing to talk to.

If any part of your setup depends on the internet, and for a cloud POS it does, the ONT and router must be on backup too. They sip power, often 10 to 25 watts combined, so protecting them is cheap. Skipping them makes everything else pointless.

How to size a UPS without guessing

Add up the wattage of the must-stay-on gear. A rough real-world counter looks like this:

• POS terminal or tablet plus receipt printer: 30 to 60 W
• Network switch and Wi-Fi access point: 15 to 30 W
• Fibre ONT and router: 10 to 25 W
• 4-channel CCTV recorder with cameras: 40 to 80 W

Call it roughly 150 W for a small shop. Now two numbers matter. UPS units are sold in VA, not watts, and the usable wattage is lower than the VA figure, typically around 60 percent for cheaper units. So a 1000 VA UPS gives you about 600 W of headroom, comfortable for a 150 W load.

Runtime is the second number, and it falls off fast as load rises. That same 1000 VA unit might hold a 150 W load for 30 to 45 minutes, but only a few minutes at 500 W. For longer outages you move from a standard UPS to an inverter with a proper deep-cycle battery, where you size the battery in amp-hours against the runtime you want. Tell your installer the load in watts and the hours you need, and the sizing follows from there.

UPS, inverter, or generator

• UPS: instant switchover, good for short cuts and clean shutdowns. The right tool for a till and network gear during the usual 10 to 40 minute outage.
• Inverter with deep-cycle batteries: for hours of runtime on a modest load. Quiet, no fuel, ideal where cuts are long but your critical load is small.
• Generator: only when you must run heavy loads (fridges, many workstations) through long or all-day outages. Pair it with a UPS so the gap while it starts does not reboot your systems.

CCTV has its own runtime math

Cameras are the thing you most want running during a blackout, because that is exactly when opportunistic theft happens. A recorder plus a handful of PoE cameras often draws 40 to 80 W. Put the recorder, the PoE switch, and the router on the same backup so footage keeps recording and you can still view it. A camera system that dies the moment the lights go out is protecting you at precisely the wrong times.

Power is only half of it

Even with the till and router on battery, a cloud POS still needs the internet to reach its server. If your provider's equipment upstream also lost power, you may have local power but no connection. This is why we push for POS systems that keep taking sales offline and sync when the link returns. Battery backup and offline mode are two halves of the same plan. One without the other still leaves you stuck.

Batteries are a maintenance item, not a fixture

UPS and inverter batteries degrade, and Kenya's heat speeds that up. A battery that gave 40 minutes when new may give ten after a couple of years, and you will not notice until an outage catches you out. Test under real load every few months and budget to replace batteries on a cycle. A UPS with a dead battery is an expensive power strip.