Energy theft is not one thing. It is six things. And they all fire the same event.

Because they all come from the same institutional stakeholder, which is the utility. Nature Scientific Reports, MDPI Energies, ScienceDirect, IET Smart Cities, Franklin Grid: every top-ranked 2026 result frames energy theft as a classification problem over smart-meter consumption telemetry. Stacking ensembles, graph convolutional networks, SVM at 86.67 percent accuracy against random forest at 83.33 percent. All of it is optimising a single number: can the distributor correctly flag a kWh account that under-reports. That is the utility's problem. If you own the building, not the grid, you are paying for a different class of losses that the kWh channel never sees at all, because most of them never touch a smart meter to begin with.

First, panel tap: someone pulls load off the house panel or an unmetered service-panel-room bus. Second, submeter bypass: a jumper across a unit submeter makes its downstream load read zero. Third, gas meter tamper: bypass, magnet, or bridge across the residential gas meter or propane regulator. Fourth, solar install copper strip: theft of DC copper wiring, MPPTs, and inverters from rooftop or ground-mount solar arrays. Fifth, EV charger freeload: an unauthorised resident or neighbour plugs into a reserved stall, common-area Level 2, or amenity charger. Sixth, HVAC condenser coil cut: a thief cuts the refrigerant lines on an outdoor AC condenser to strip the copper coils, a few hundred dollars of scrap and a four- to five-figure replacement for the owner. Each of these happens at a specific physical point. The owner's problem is not classification. The owner's problem is identification at that point.

Because Cyrano's detection primitive is not commodity-specific. It is person-in-polygon with a dwell threshold and an ISO timestamp. The event class is pre_action_zone_entry and it does not care whether the polygon is drawn around a gas meter can, a rooftop solar hatch, an EV charging stall, or an HVAC condenser pad. The only field that changes between vectors is the zone string. Everything else in the payload (timestamp, dwell_seconds, tile.label, thumb.url, overlay_mask, latency_ms, delivery) is identical. A utility has to train one ML model per commodity and typically per meter vendor. Cyrano draws six polygons on the existing DVR multiview feed and emits the same event for any of them.

event.class = pre_action_zone_entry, property identifier, tile.label (which camera tile), zone (one of submeter_closet_3rd_floor, gas_meter_can_outside, ev_charger_stall_14, solar_inverter_rooftop_hatch, hvac_condenser_pad_unit_212, exterior_pedestal_bay_17, or whatever polygons you draw), zone.armed_window (local time range), dwell_seconds (integer), timestamp (ISO 8601 with offset, to the second), a tile thumbnail URL at 480x270 centred on the event, overlay_mask (which DVR chrome was masked before inference so the detection is not firing on a clock digit or a channel bug), delivery channel (WhatsApp group or SMS fallback), and latency_ms from capture to delivery. The payload is the audit record. Drop it into a case file, an insurance claim, a utility investigator's packet, or an HOA violation notice without reformatting.

No. Think of the camera zone as the second source of truth that pairs with whatever meter signal you already have. The meter, the submeter, or the utility report tells you what was stolen and how much (kWh, therms, gallons, dollars). The zone event tells you who, when, and for how long, standing at which specific physical point. Neither one alone is a recovery document. Together they become one. If you do not have submetering for a given commodity, the zone event alone still gives you a prosecution record and a defendant. If you do have submetering, the zone event takes the monthly anomaly from unattributable to attributable.

Because the outcome is an energy-denied-to-paying-residents loss at the owner's expense. A cut condenser does not just cost a scrap value in copper. It costs refrigerant, recertification, a full condenser unit replacement in the three to five thousand dollar range, and the revenue impact of a unit whose AC is down for however many days. The industry tends to put this under metal theft, but from the operator's P&L it is part of the same portfolio of losses as submeter bypass and gas tamper. Any serious energy-theft program for a multifamily operator has to include condenser pads. A zone on the pad with a 20-second dwell and a 22:00 to 06:00 armed window catches the approach before the refrigerant line gets cut.

The commodity signal is irrelevant to the camera primitive. You draw the polygon around the gas meter can, the regulator, or the propane tank fill point. When someone enters the polygon outside the armed window and dwells longer than the threshold, the event fires. If your utility's gas theft team is investigating, they get a timestamped record of a person at that meter. If the theft is an insider using a magnet on a residential gas meter, you have a video-corroborated event placed on the timeline of when the meter telemetry went anomalous. If your property has propane tanks for pool heating or tenant stoves, the fill point is a well-known tap target and a zone on it is nearly free.

No. Cyrano consumes whatever image your DVR or NVR is already recording. Standard IR-capable PoE or analog cameras cover all six vectors at night. For unlit interior spaces (submeter closets, service panel rooms), either the existing camera is already IR or you drop a small IR LED bar for about forty dollars. Rooftop solar hatches and ground-mount arrays typically already have a camera because insurance requires it. The detection is image-based and does not care whether the subject is illuminated by visible light, IR, or parking-lot floods, only whether a human is visible in the frame.

One Cyrano unit, 25 camera tiles, six to ten zones drawn. A typical 120-unit multifamily property has one service panel room, two or three submeter closets, a gas meter bank, two or three HVAC condenser pads, one solar rooftop hatch (if the property has solar), and two to six EV charger stalls. That is eight to fourteen zones, well under the 25-tile per-unit capacity. Install is HDMI in, HDMI out to the existing guard monitor, network, power, two minutes of physical connection. Zone drawing is 30 to 60 seconds per zone in the admin. Events start landing on the property's WhatsApp thread the same afternoon.

A guard cannot be at a submeter closet, a gas meter can, a rooftop solar array, an EV charger stall, a condenser pad, and an exterior power pedestal simultaneously. A 25-tile Cyrano unit is, functionally, a guard that is watching every one of those polygons every second. The guard costs three to five thousand dollars a month at market rates for a single shift. Cyrano is a one-time hardware cost plus a monthly service fee in the low hundreds. Unlike a guard, it produces a structured event payload that pairs with submeter or commodity data, which is the thing a court or a utility investigator actually wants.