Practical guides, not sales pages

If a fixed wireless base station covers your area, it's usually the most cost-effective dedicated connection for daily use — better suited to sustained, always-on demand than mobile data, which is shared across everyone nearby on the same tower.

Starlink makes sense when no fixed wireless or fibre coverage reaches you at all — farms, remote plots, and some rural towns — or when you specifically need a connection that isn't tied to any local tower infrastructure. It requires a clear view of the sky and professional mounting to perform reliably.

Mobile data (MTN, Telecel, AirtelTigo SIMs) is best treated as a backup, not a primary connection, since it's shared bandwidth and speeds vary with local network load at any given time.

Our rule of thumb: get a free site survey before deciding. Whether fixed wireless reaches your exact rooftop depends on line-of-sight to the nearest base station, which we check for free rather than guess at.

Rather than a fixed number, count entry points first: every door, gate and window at ground level that someone could realistically use to enter unnoticed. Each usually needs its own camera rather than relying on one wide-angle camera to cover several.

Add coverage for blind spots — the side of a building without windows, a driveway, a compound wall — since these are exactly where incidents tend to happen unrecorded.

For a typical single-family home compound in Ghana, this usually lands between 4 and 8 cameras. Larger shops, offices or estates scale up from there based on the number of entry points and the property's layout, not a generic per-square-metre formula.

Avoid: buying the cheapest bundle of cameras before a walk-through. Mis-positioned cameras are the most common reason CCTV footage turns out useless exactly when it's needed.

Start by listing what must stay on during an outage — not everything in the building, just the essentials: router, access points, a fridge, some lighting. List each item's power draw and how many hours you want it backed up for.

A common mistake is buying a system sized for the whole house "just in case," which multiplies cost for backup capacity that's rarely used. A modest battery bank sized to your router, NVR and a few lights is often enough to keep the things that actually matter running through Ghana's typical outage length.

Battery/solar backup switches on instantly and has no ongoing fuel cost, but has a higher upfront price for a given capacity than a generator. Many households use both: solar for daily essentials, a generator kept in reserve for extended outages or heavier loads.

Before any payment changes hands, ask to see the site plan (a licensed surveyor's scaled drawing of the exact boundaries) and the indenture or deed of assignment showing the chain of ownership back to the original grantor.

If the land is customary (family or stool) land, confirm that whoever is selling actually has the family or stool's authority to do so — a common source of Ghanaian land disputes is a sale by someone without that authority.

Where the land has progressed to formal title registration, ask for the Land Title Certificate, which carries a stronger state-backed guarantee than an indenture alone. Not all land has reached this stage, so a properly registered indenture with a verified site plan is still common and can be legitimate.

Always: engage an independent lawyer for final review before payment, regardless of who is helping you source the land. No advisor, including AerixSys, can responsibly guarantee against every possible future dispute — thorough documentation review reduces the risk but a lawyer protects your specific interests in the transaction.

A breaker that trips occasionally under heavy load can be normal. A breaker that trips repeatedly, or sockets that feel warm to the touch, are signs of an underlying fault rather than a breaker problem — replacing the breaker alone won't fix it.

Flickering lights unrelated to grid outages, visible old rubber-insulated cable, and a DB board that looks decades old relative to the building's electrical load are all reasons to book an assessment rather than wait for a failure.

If you're planning to add solar backup, check your DB board compatibility first — many older boards aren't configured to safely integrate an inverter and battery bank without an upgrade.

The most common mistake is buying disconnected smart devices — a lock from one brand, a camera app from another — that end up running from five different apps that don't talk to each other. Start instead by deciding which single app should control everything, then choose devices that integrate into it.

Prioritise smart locks and key lighting first if budget is limited; these give the most day-to-day convenience and, paired with your existing CCTV, the most practical security benefit. Whole-house lighting and switch automation is a nice-to-have you can add later.

If any smart device controls access (a lock) or safety (lighting for a stairwell), wire it so it keeps working through a power cut — either via battery backup built into the device or your existing solar backup — rather than assuming WiFi and grid power will always be there.

Mikrotik hardware tends to win on raw configurability and price — it's a strong fit if you (or your IT support) want granular control over routing, firewalls and bandwidth management, and don't mind a steeper learning curve.

UniFi tends to win on ease of ongoing management — a cleaner web dashboard for non-technical staff to monitor, and simpler multi-access-point WiFi roaming for hotels or offices with several floors.

Our default recommendation: Mikrotik at the edge (routing, firewall, hotspot billing) with UniFi access points for WiFi coverage — combining Mikrotik's routing strength with UniFi's simpler day-to-day WiFi management. We size this to your team's technical comfort level, not just the hardware spec sheet.

A single router works fine for a small apartment, but concrete walls — standard in most Ghanaian construction — block WiFi signal far more than the drywall most routers are designed and tested around, creating dead zones in back bedrooms, upper floors, or anywhere with a thick wall in between.

Mesh WiFi systems or strategically placed access points solve this by creating multiple signal sources that hand off to each other as you move through the building, rather than relying on one router to punch through every wall in the house.

Before buying anything: a walk-through with a signal meter tells you exactly where coverage drops, rather than guessing and buying more hardware than you need.

The most common gap isn't a missing camera — it's a camera pointed at the wrong thing. Driveways and front doors get covered; side passages, boundary walls, and the back of the compound (where intruders actually prefer to enter, precisely because they're unwatched) often don't.

The second most common gap is cameras with no power backup — recording stops exactly during a power cut, which is also when opportunistic entry is more likely since visible lighting and alarms may also be down.

The third is no access control at the gate itself — a padlock and a watchman is common, but leaves no record of who entered or when, unlike a biometric or logged system.

Lithium (LiFePO4) batteries generally tolerate Ghana's ambient heat better than gel/lead-acid batteries, hold more usable capacity for their physical size, and tend to last several times longer through daily charge/discharge cycles — at a higher upfront cost.

Gel batteries cost less upfront and are a reasonable choice for lighter, occasional backup needs, but degrade faster under frequent deep discharge — common in areas with long or frequent outages — and don't handle heat as gracefully over years of use.

Our rule of thumb: if outages in your area are frequent or long, the lithium premium usually pays for itself in avoided battery replacements within a few years.

A distribution board (DB board) sized for a building's electrical load 15-20 years ago often can't safely handle today's load — added air conditioners, an inverter, more sockets — without nuisance tripping or, worse, overheating that goes unnoticed until it's a fire risk.

Skipping a needed DB board upgrade to save money upfront is one of the more expensive mistakes we see — it typically shows up later as a solar installation that can't proceed safely, or a wiring fault that's more disruptive (and costly) to fix once it's caused damage.

A DB board assessment is part of every wiring and solar site survey we do, specifically to catch this before it becomes a bigger problem.

Under Ghana's Lands Act, 2020 (Act 1036), non-citizens — including expats and Ghanaians who've taken on other citizenship without dual-citizenship status — cannot hold a freehold interest in land. The maximum interest available to a non-citizen is generally a leasehold, commonly up to 50 years, renewable subject to negotiation with the landowner.

Citizens can hold freehold land directly, or lease land from a stool, skin, clan or family for terms commonly up to 99 years under customary tenure arrangements.

Why this matters before you fall in love with a plot: the type of interest available on a specific parcel affects both price and long-term security, and should be confirmed in writing before any money changes hands — not assumed based on what a seller tells you verbally.