Solar surveillance trailer,
or something simpler?

What is a solar surveillance trailer?

A towable trailer that raises cameras on a mast and runs them from its own solar panels and battery. Published units carry two to four cameras on an 18 to 30 ft mast with roughly 640 to 1,350 W of solar123. It needs no power run, no trenching and no electrician, and it tows behind a pickup to the next site when the job moves.

The height is the point. A camera 25 ft up sees across an open lot in a way nothing on a fence line can, and that is worth real money on the sites where it matters.

What it costs, and what that buys

As of September 2026, Washington operators publish monthly rates from about $799 for a basic unit to roughly $2,000 for the units most construction customers take45. Managed remote video guarding, where people watch the feed and intervene, costs more again. On top of the monthly you should expect delivery and pickup, a charge to relocate the trailer on site, a deposit or damage waiver, and monitoring priced separately.

Over a nine-month build at the middle of that range, a trailer is a five-figure line item. That is money well spent on the right site and badly spent on the wrong one, which is the whole reason this page exists.

Does Rivas Technology Group lease trailers?

No. We do not operate a trailer fleet, and we are not going to take a deposit for something we would have to go and rent from somebody else. If a trailer is genuinely what your site needs, we will tell you that at the site walk and point you at operators who have them.

What we build is the solar alarm tower: an Ajax intrusion alarm with photo verification on a self-contained solar tower. It detects someone in the area you chose, photographs what set the alarm off, sounds outdoor sirens on site and puts the alarm on your phone over its own cellular connection. It does not record video.

So which does your site need?

Ask what you want to happen at 2 a.m.

If the answer is "I want to know someone is in the yard while they are still in it", that is an alarm. The photo tells you whether it is a person or a tarp in the wind, the sirens tell the person they have been seen, and the whole thing costs a fraction of a trailer lease. That covers most laydown yards, container rows, compounds, gates and materials cages in the South Sound.

If the answer is "I need footage of what happened", you want the video layer. Two honest options: lease a trailer from an operator who has one, or install a permanent camera system if the site becomes a building anyway. We design the second, on business security.

Large sites sometimes want both: a trailer watching the open ground and alarm towers on the areas that actually hold the value. There is nothing wrong with that, and a site walk sorts it out in an hour.

What about winter?

It is the question nobody asks until December. Washington delivers 6.37 peak sun hours a day in July and 1.32 in December6, so an off-grid unit collects roughly a fifth of its summer energy while the load stays the same. Camera trailers draw considerably more than an alarm does, so the gap bites them harder.

Operators close it three ways: a bigger array, a built-in generator, or shore power where the site has an outlet. Ask which one you are being given before you sign a lease that runs through October to March. The alarm tower has an easier time of it, because four detectors, a hub and two sirens draw a small fraction of what three PTZ cameras and a recorder do.

Where we work

From 415 Railroad Ave S, Kent, WA 98032, about 30 minutes from most South Sound sites. That covers Kent, Renton, Tukwila, Federal Way, Auburn, Covington, Maple Valley, Tacoma, Puyallup, Sumner, Bonney Lake, Tehaleh, University Place and Gig Harbor. The Olympic Peninsula and sites farther afield are by appointment and quote.

If you are pricing site security for a South Sound job, the fastest route is a site walk. Start at construction site security, or tell us the address and we will come and look.