Outdoor battery dead in 20 days

This is my public apology. I will try harder to see the fine print in the future.

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I Appreciate your candor.

With that being said. The fine print says nothing about live streaming having such a big impact on battery.

How many events are you getting over the life of your battery? Roughly 1100 events consumes around 85% of the battery for me.

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Wow, thanks! Interesting metic!

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I also got around 20 days and that’s with an average of one event a day! Yes, one! I drive by it numerous times a day but my SUV must be too small for the motion sensor to pick up. This camera is one big disappointment.

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if you are having detection issues, please refer to below troubleshooting guide. One other thing to check is the signal strength. If it is far and signal is weak, suggest change the resolution to 360p.

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My battery died in 4 days outside. 20 would have been great! I tested indoors for about a month in a high traffic (high motion/notification) area and the battery life was solid. Had about 50% battery after a month. Then moved outdoors at just slightly further distance from the base and boom battery zapped to almost zero from a full charge in 3-4 days. It has a signal and stays connected, but for some reason the draw on the battery increased incredibly.

let me start this by saying, i have no idea whats going on with your cam. However there are 2 things i can think of that might be contributing to this. 1) heat! how hot is it where your camera is? getting hot is really hard on batteries. 2) Signal strength. it might sound strange but if a wifi device has a very weak signal they tend to try and try and try to connect. This causes them to use much more power than if they had a stronger signal.

and just one more, but this is unlikely to be the cause. Have you made any changes to your internal network? I use a Pihole server for ad blocking in my house. This doesn’t seam to have an affect on my Wyze products, but with other devices they really want ads and will continuously attempt to download them causing a MASSIVE drain on battery (Thanks Microsoft). Again i doubt this is it, but is anything on your network attempting to block traffic?

I’m also really struggling with battery life (about 3 weeks per charge). I don’t get many detections per day and I’m not live streaming. Maybe I’m too far away from the base station but I’m really not that far. I haven’t installed it where I want to yet because I don’t want to drag the ladder out every three weeks to recharge.

Any statistics Accross all users on how long the battery should last under minimal detection scenarios?

Maybe I just have a faulty unit? Maybe it’s a problem
On my end?

How many detections do you have on a daily basis ?

Are you connected to Google/or Tinycam ?

Hi. Maybe 4 or 5 a day. And no not connected to anything other than Wyze base.

I am experiencing similar very short battery life…and most of my use has been inside in 70 F or less air conditioned space, I was anxious to install it outside, but after seeing battery life drain about 20% in 3 days of very light indoor use, I knew there was NO WAY the battery would last as long as your marketing claimed. And I didn’t want the hassle of having to take down an outdoor camera MONTHLY to charge it! So it’s been relegated to being a project camera to record progress on projects in the garage or in the yard on a temporary basis…like I would use a go pro. I’m very disappointed in this camera after the wait. And it sounds a little like Steve Jobs old “you’re holding it wrong” excuse, blaming the end user.

@itbedave

Have you tried troubleshooting the battery life in the thread I linked below. An employee from WYZE has been helping troubleshoot the issues. The battery definitely should not be draining that fast.

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Hi Jason. I hadn’t seen this trouble shooting post but I am compliant with all of this. The camera has been fully charged with the supplied cables twice now, it’s in a low traffic low heat area, it should be plenty close to the base, I’m not live streaming or anything else crazy. Maybe I just have a bad battery? Happy to try other things to figure it out but right now this isn’t useful and I can’t purchase the rest of them for the outside of my house if I can’t get this one to work properly. Open to additional suggestions. Is most everyone else having good experiences with battery life?

I don’t know that I would say good experience. My battery lasts about 40 day in a relatively high traffic area (30 to 40 events a day) and with a 1 min cool down

@hgarrett

If that is the case I would probably contact Wyze support

I’ve not tried all of the steps yet, no. But if the battery says it’s at 100% , does it really matter if it was charged from the base station or another charger? I’m curious about the science behind the battery lasting longer if charged from the base station, if that’s the claim they are making?

Camera was at 100% charge yesterday when I took it outside to do a time lapse, taking a still photo every 15 seconds… So 4 photos a minute. So how long SHOULD the battery last under those conditions? Or was a feature Wyze advertised that was desirable to me. But I would say overall, the camera recorded maybe 4 hours total of time lapse photos over the course of the entire day (not 4 hours in a row.) Motion detection wasn’t on and it wasn’t streaming video during that time, and it has a strong WiFi connection to the base. Yet my camera was dead… 0% battery… at the end of the day.

Maybe that’s expected? But I certainly didn’t expect that. If I wanted to do an actual full day of time lapse photos, I’d have to use a USB battery with it. It wouldn’t be close to able to endure an entire day.

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What I like is how they do not give you any step by step instructions on how to set up your cameras properly, instructions just say use the app to configure and you have to go over all the settings blindly read what they do and figure out how to set it up and there is no explanation to how things work within the system. It is not that the settings are not easy to understand on their own, it is that they do not provide you a road map to properly explain how it all ties together in order to either live stream it 100% or go max battery with just what you need to capture events.

I setup a rule to use motion detection and upload video to cloud when even detected, then the app asks me if I am sure I want to do that the when and action are on the same device, which leads me to believe I am doing something wrong but who knows nothing says exactly what to do. I mean yes I want my one camera to detect a thing and record the thing…

in a short 3 days with little to no events being recorded maybe one a day and the camera is at 67%, so by my math it will last 21 days at best.

I just installed my first (and maybe last) Wyze cam yesterday. It was fully charged but this morning it’s already down to 78%. The only event was my wife going to work this morning.

Is there a way to make it not live stream and only wake up and record if it captures motion?

Live streaming for a long time with the battery powered cam is a bad idea. Do you have an SD card in the cam or the Base? Open the app, tap on the cam to open. Tap the gear icon top right to open settings, turn event recording on, set cool down for 1 min, turn on back up to the base if it has an 32GB SD card in it. Make sure you turn on notifications. Also in the settings tap detection settings and make sure the area you want to catch movement is in the PIR zone, the shaded area. The cam detects motion best when movement is across the zone not straight at or away from it. Don’t use the cam looking out a window, it won’t capture anything. In detection settings set sensitivity to 100%

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Other information about WYZE Cam Outdoor can be found here:

https://support.wyze.com/hc/en-us/sections/360011338891-Wyze-Cam-Outdoor