Battery life

[Dwnh]

I’m perplexed. Everything was working fine until I had to switch to the “new” app. Now my cameras go on and offline at will and battery life on all models, including my brand new Pro 6 cams is horrible. Roughly 30 percent of what I used to get. I do have a mix of being directly connected to 2ghz WiFi and an old base station. If I do the work to eliminate the base station and use my router will that help?

I’m truly disappointed now. Makes me feel like scrapping everything that worked just fine for over 5 years!

 I’m at my wits end.

[ShayneS]

Hi @Dwnh,

Thank you for reaching out. To help diagnose the issues you're experiencing, could you identify which specific camera is giving you the most trouble? Narrowing it down to one device at a time will allow me to assist more effectively.

A couple of things I'm noticing on my end at the moment:

Signal strength: Some of your devices are showing high RSSI values, which indicates a weak signal between the camera and your router or base station. In this case you are using the base station. This can contribute to connectivity drops and increased battery usage.

Motion activity: I'm seeing a significant number of motion-triggered events, which is one of the biggest factors in battery drain.

Your current base station appears to be from around 2018. Over time, hardware components may experience natural wear, which can impact connectivity and overall performance.

If you like we can try removing and reconnecting one of your Pro 6 cameras to your wifi to see if you see any improvements. Your trail camera has a very weak signal at the moment and appears to be the case since you onboarded the device and placed in its current position. Note, connecting directly to your router requires you to be on a 2.4GHz network during install and you will lose any local storage compatability while not connected to the base station. 

[Dwnh]

I appreciate the response but I’ve not made any adjustments or changes to my cameras in years, other than purchasing newer ones recently that I connected to WiFi to try to give my base station a break.  I’m thinking about replacing or eliminating the base station soon. Even my solar powered cameras seem to be draining faster lately. No offense but I don’t think it’s anything on my end but I’ll try updating equipment soon, thanks.

[Dwnh]

I’ve also changed some settings to make battery last a little longer such as black and white nite vision and optimized power instead of best quality. We’ll see if these help. The trail cam (now renamed front trail) was moved and I expect it will need to be moved again when the leaves come out on the trees. It’s definitely on the edge of the range so I understand why that particular camera might have issues soon. We have had a lot of animal activity lately so I’m trying to be pragmatic. I’m hoping the power and quality adjustments will help. Thanks.

[ShayneS]

Thanks for the feedback. Given the base station has been in use for over 7 years, there’s a possibility of some performance degradation. If you have a specific device you’d like to focus on, we can start there. The goal of these steps is to help isolate the issue and determine the underlying cause.