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pjflaherty67's profile

Sunday, October 22nd, 2023 11:03 AM

Camera Battery Fail

Curious why Simplisafe not trying to get ahead of this battery drainage issue on the OD cameras. Seems common. I had four of these things, three of them work great, one sucks. That’s a 25% fail rate (limited sample size, but that’s my controlled experience). Got punted around like a hackysack by tech support yesterday acting like this was a charger issue (holding a full charge for exactly 5 seconds before dumping isn’t a charger issue, regardless of how low a voltage the port is). I did ask if I was speaking with a trainee or if they were just understaffed when this response came up after an hour. If charging ports/voltages were really an issue, a charging dock would be included (as with Ring devices) And you can’t  reset a camera with a dead battery, no matter what the firmware has been updated to (system’s claiming my firmware is UTD, incidentally). Understanding that variables are what they are, battery issues aren’t a tough solve, Simplisafe just needs to own up and stop trying to gaslight loyal customers about battery failures which ARE going to occur. This is the first equipment failure I’ve ever had across multiple SS systems. Sad to see it handled so poorly. I’ll send the gear back on my own, but taking ownership as a company policy would have been the right response here.

Community Admin

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3.1K Messages

9 months ago

Hi @pjflaherty67, 

Improving the performance of the Outdoor Camera - including its battery life - is something our engineers are very focused on right now. How quickly do you find that your camera's battery dies? While it is recommended to charge the camera's battery with a 5V, 7.5W+, 1.5A+ adapter, other factors can cause the battery to drain.

How many motion events does this Outdoor Camera get compared to the other three that don't seem to have this issue? If this problem camera gets more than 10 motion events a day, it can help to set up Activity Zones so the camera only detects motion in the areas you want, or change its motion detection to People Only. If this camera gets fewer than 10 events a day, and/or gets the same number of events as your other cameras, we may need to replace the unit. Our Support team can help with that.

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