Hey there so I recently got two A119 dashcams installed into my Honda Jazz (one for front and one for rear) on a Friday night by someone who has high ratings on Airtasker.
My car was fine until Monday after work when I went into my car to go home the car wouldn't start. Had someone helped with jump starting the car and it's all good now.
Is there any tips on how to prevent this from happening again? Should I change any of the dashcam settings or something to cause less battery drainage?
Are you sure it was the dashcam that flattened your battery or is the battery on the way out?
I've left my car undriven for two weeks without draining the battery with my installed twin Viofos'.
If the installer has connected everything correctly I'd be getting my battery and electrical system checked before blaming the dashcams.
Did you hardwire the dashcam using the hardwire kit? The kit should include a switch that cuts the power when your battery gets to a certain voltage (of your choosing) to prevent running the battery flat. If you don't use parking mode, then change the fuse to accessory so that it turns off with your car, rather than an always on fuse.
you need to select the voltage which would be cutoff voltage to the camera, otherwise it will drain the battery. Were the airtasker directly connected it to the battery without any cutoff circuit ?
different voltage settings : https://viofo.com/544-large_default/mini-hk3-acc-hardwire-ki…
Yeah, never get auto electrics fitted via Airtasker - lol
Am betting it's wired directly to the battery without going via accessory fuse nor hardwire kit (an Airtasker isn't going to care about those things)!
Will be flat again when needed Tues morning :/
It wasn't the dash-cam that caused that. Either something else has gone wrong or your battery is on its last legs. A decent car battery should power a dash cam for a week without degrading the charge to a point where the car wont start.
Nar
Yeah…
A tiny dash cam is not going to kill a car battery over night/during the day, no matter how many negs people give me.
A regular 12v car battery will have about 40 to 60Ah (or about 40,000 to 60,000mAh in phone battery talk) @ 12v. A dash cam will maybe pull about 1A at 5v. An average 5v USB charger will pull about 0.3A (about 300mA) @ 12v.
40,000mAh / 300mA = about 130 hours of draw time. Or about 5.5 days worth of power supply.
60,000mAh / 300mA = about 200 hours, or 8.3 days.
The fact that the dash cam was put in on Friday night and the car started ok on Monday morning but failed to start Monday after work tells me it wasn't a piss ant tiny little 5v 1A dash cam doing that draining over the course of a work shift if it didnt do it over the course of the weekend.
Neg away, chimps.
Considering I just dealt with my black vue dr750s draining a brand new nz70 battery (supacharge gold plus with extra reserve time) in about 3 days, your calcutions might not match the real world.
Especially considering an auto electrician checked every circuit in the car for an electrical parasite and the dashcam was the only one (it turned out the power magic pro low voltage cut off had failed).
These figures also probably only work at SLC and a 50+ degree engine bay is far from testing conditions.
Sometimes real world experience trumps stuff you can google my guy.
@teacherer: I have the DR750 (front and rear) and the car sat in the garage for over a week without issue… Started this morning no problems.. sadly it was to drive to work :(
@pharkurnell: Mine was set to run 24/7 until the low voltage cut off kicked.
Yours maybe have been set to motion detection perhaps.
in about 3 days
in 3 days… not 8 hours. And OP's drive to work should have topped the battery off on that drive.
Sometimes real world experience trumps stuff you can google my guy.
And I get that my calculations are in an ideal work with perfect values, but they are used as indicative only or a "rough guesstimate". It was more to prove that if a simple dashcam is killing a battery in the course of an average 8~10 hour work shift, it isnt the dash cam. And even if the camera is killing the battery in 8ish hours, it means the battery has about 2 to 5Ah of storage left, ergo the battery is (fropanity), not the camera.
I am an auto electrician and work on cars with these kinds of issues daily. I install lots of battery and charging systems and big (fropanity) 4x4 accessory mods as well, so I need to do these calculations fairly regularly to make sure what the customer wants their battery system to do, it will cope.
Something that draws less than 1 amp on a car that is basically driven almost every day of the week, I wouldn't even bother working out its potential to battery life, as it's just not that important. The internal systems of the car would probably draw more than that while they are idle.
@pegaxs: I guess it should be noted
The 2x dashcams probably drained the battery for 60 hours? Friday night to monday morning.
How long might his drive be to work?
When this was occuring to me, my drive to work was 2 minutes so most autoelectricians shrugged the problem off saying it was normal.
If he had a fast drive to work it could have easily been 70 hours with very little charge put in.
70 hours seems like plenty to kill even a moderately healthy battery, just like mine.
All depends, but yeah his battery is probably cactus.
@teacherer: I have had this problem ever since i switched from viofo to blckvue 650 and a new car. I get about 12 hours out of park mode before it turns off, ive had the battery warning sign come up sometimes when its lasted longer and most of the time as soon as i open my car door (whuich causes things to boot up electrically) the blackvue powers down.
I NEVER had this happen with viofo. Its a right PITA to be honest, who knows what would happen if i actually have to leave my care somewhere for 3 or 4 days.
I think this is easily provable with a fully charged 40AH car battery directly connected to a dashcam with time-lapse video recording I suppose?
But it's worth noting that battery doesn't need to lose all its power to be not able to crank the starter motor. A battery that can't start a car can still power a dashcam for several hours more.
It could be the airtasker wired it incorrectly such that the car is always in ACC mode and gives power to more devices than just the dashcam.
Hope OP updates what it turned out to be.
You need to hardware with a fuse that power it after egnition is on.
Is it possible to power these things with something like a powerbank when parked?
Just use the car battery but have it installed and configured properly its no issue. Theres willions of them out there in cars that dont cause issue.
YMMV
turn off the parking settings or change it to the least intensive option, otherwise you might look at getting someone who knows what they're doing to put it into a fuse slot that is only powered while the key is turned