Outdoor battery camera with wire -> Battery drained, camera off

[guppy98]

So I've had a Nest cam (battery) for a couple of years and moved it to a new location recently where it will be hard to keep removing to charge.  So I bought the outdoor cable for it.  Ran the cable, hooked it up on Friday - all good!  Google home shows infinity for the battery life, the settings automatically changed to a "custom" value and it worked fine all weekend.

Except this morning.  I woke up to the camera being unavailable and GH telling me the battery was entirely drained.  Whaaa?  I didn't have time to deal with it this morning but when I got home, the green light was on..but no feed.  I dismounted the camera, brought it inside and plugged into charge.  GH tells me it will take close to 9 hours to charge!!  Wow.

Why would the battery drain like this when it's hard wired?  I checked all the typical things - cable in correct, getting power (since it worked on Friday). The cable is the genuine one from Google so it's not some Aliexpress job 🙂

I'm wondering if since the camera is a couple of years old, there's some battery fault or something?

Any thoughts?

[MplsCustomer · Accepted solution]

@guppy98

There have been a few other posts from other customers in this forum reporting that when they added the optional power cable for their battery camera some time after originally installing it, they discovered they had to remove their camera from the Google Home app, do a factory reset, and then reinstall it, or their battery would deplete.

The speculation on these posts is that something happens during the install process to configure the camera as "plugged in" and NOT running on battery power, and this is a hidden setting that only gets set during the install process.

We've had a battery camera plugged in for over 3 years and have never had battery problems, so it hasn't happened to us.

[guppy98]

Wow, ok, good to know.  I will give that a whirl tonight!  Thanks for this reply, really appreciate it!

[guppy98]

It's been a couple of days now and this SEEMS to have sorted things.  Will monitor for a few more days.  Thanks again for the great advice! 👍

[626k]

My doorbell camera is not charging