Betreff: Battery life in cold climates

[ash31]

I have 4 cameras at a second home in the Colorado mountains, 2 mounted inside and 2 outside. They have worked perfectly since installation over 6 months ago and the battery indicators have all been showing full strength for the entire period. Only one camera that is mounted outside facing the street 30ft away gets an extensive motion detection workout from cars passing by, typically 3 or 4 messages per day. I love the product. We get to see the snow from afar.

However just today the outside street-facing camera is indicating offline. I would suspect the batteries have deteriorated due to usage and cold temperatures, except that one of the inside cameras went offline a couple of weeks ago and then came back online unassisted about 48 hours later. So I'll wait a day or two to see what happens, no problem and we will be back there in a week's time, and have ordered a batch of replacement batteries as I really do expect them to need replacing eventually.

But meanwhile it has me wondering how well I can expect the outside cameras to perform given the effect the low temperatures must be having on the batteries. It's currently hitting single (Fahrenheit) digits overnight and 20's during the day, so I've actually been quite impressed at how well the cameras have stayed online so far.

What are other users' experiences?

[TomMac]

Have run the cameras down to 0 degrees.... It is a fact as thes batteries start getting real cold the chemical process can slow down.

Tho the temps spec for the OEM primary cell runs to somewhere to -30f, the amount of discharge is lower at negitive temps to the point where it may not have enough current to run a device.

Only way to know is really try.  ( btw, rechargeables are worst at these low temps below zero )

[ash31]

Thanks for your report TomMac. The camera didn't come back online so I'm sure it's just the batteries ran out. My other outdoor camera which doesn't catch much motion is still going strong despite the low overnight temperatures.

At the other temperature extreme the outdoor camera at my house in Arizona experienced 110+ temps and some direct sun during the summer, but is still running well on batteries that were installed back in March.

[TomMac]

Everything I've seen shows higher activity is the usual problem (barring defects of course) for bad battery life

As the specs state, 4 min per day on optimized video settings.  The camera that gets the higher activity may be served better by pulling the view down to lessen the road activity usage ( unless thats what you want ).

On high video settings, I avg almost 4 months use for 4 cameras with OEm batteries. Others are so far out of normal use range, they are more 'test' cameras ( either 1 min per week or 30+mins per day ).

As to colder temps, I haven't had a camera die ( OEM batteries ) down to zero degrees... I did notice a possible lessening of time for the batteries but maybe a week, so it's really hard to say that was the reason.

Good luck, it will be interesting to hear your results this winter.

[2climb]

ash31,

I just bought a place in Florissant, CO which is up in the mountains at about 9200 ft. I have a second home in Las Vegas and installed the system there to check it out. Keep me posted as to your experience as I will be installing a system in the Colorado house. Hopefully it will allow me to monitor the horses etc…

Frank

[ash31]

2climb,

Our CO house is at 9,300ft so looks like we have similar conditions. As TomMac suggests, it appears to be the amount of motion capture that impacts battery life mostly until it gets down to serious sub zero temps. I fine-tuned the detection fields and sensitivity on each of our cameras to limit the amount of video captured each day and it's worked out quite well at >6 months battery life for the most active one.

This leads to another issue which is to make sure the batteries don't die when you're 750 miles away. We spend lengthy periods in one place or another, so there's a reasonable window of time during which we might lose connection to a camera if the batteries die. So my next project is to adapt one camera to take 6V from an external 6V 4.5 Ah battery which for good measure will be located inside my garage 2 ft away from the outside camera. There are a few posts on this forum from other users who have experimented with this approach. I'm not personally bothered about breaking the warranty on a camera for this test.