I have three Battery Cam Pros bought in late 2023. Since then I’ve bought four replacement batteries, all Wyze and not third party.
The first was to have a spare to swap out, the next three were to replace ones that died. I now have four dead batteries and three still working. They fail in different ways, some claim they are charged immediately but don’t work others never show as charged and don’t work. Some work very briefly but show up immediately at 0% when installed. None show any obvious physical signs of damage.
I’m curious if anyone else has been experiencing such a high failure rate or has tried any third party batteries. It feels like I need a battery subscription in addition to my Wyze subscription.
Are they exposed to a lot of direct sun/heat? That’s typically the main killer of lithium based batteries.
Are they on a solar panel or anything like that? How frequently do you charge them? Charging cycles is the other killer but typically they should be good for hundreds of cycles.
They aren’t subject to any unusual heat, out in the yard shaded for most of the day.
No solar panels, just removed to charge inside when they get low. They typically only need charging every few weeks so there aren’t that many cycles on them.
Do they all seem to be going through batteries at about the same rate? 2.5 years isn’t great, but also isn’t terrible, maybe that’s just their lifespan.
The lifespan is less than 2.5 years, the first failure was Feb 2025, but I’m not of the exact lifespans. I didn’t label the batteries and they all get swapped out between cameras. I started labelling them after the fourth one died so we will see.
My other speculation was perhaps the protection circuitry is allowing the cells to discharge too much and damaging them, but that would be a pretty large oversight and seems unlikely unless their marketing team was in charge begging for longer time between charges. I guess I could start recording the voltage before charging but that is a pain.
Seems unlikely, but anything is possible. Typically if they discharge too low and trigger protection that would be a fairly sudden and immediate thing, but damage over time could contribute to it.
You could try taking one of the problematic batteries and charging it for about 15 seconds multiple times (unplugging for a few seconds after each one). I’ve brought back deep discharged lithium batteries in many types of devices this way. Each time they get a little bit of charge before the protection kicks in, and eventually it is high enough to keep charging. It can take 10, 20, or even 30 of these cycles to get it to “wake up” depending how far below the threshold they are.
If nothing else it may confirm whether they’ve gone into a protection state or if it is permanent damage.