There is a major problem with the battery usage on the duo doorbell. It’s only lasting a week for me when it is advertised to last for months. I have two batteries that I’m swapping between. I changed the battery on Thursday evening with a full battery, and now, on Sunday evening, I’m showing 54%. I’ll have to swap the batteries within a few days. I have reasonably conservative settings - power saving mode is enabled, it’s using a detection zone, event recording 45 seconds with a 15 second cooldown. Only recording AI events. I’m getting a handful of triggered events a day up to maybe 15 or so-meaning it’s not that I am recording a flag waving all day or something. I’m not watching the live stream much if at all. My firmware is up to date. As I said, I have two batteries, and they both are lasting about the same, so it’s not a bad battery. Wyze, anything you can do? This camera replaced a Pro doorbell, and I got multiple months out of that, as advertised, with similar settings. This is absolutely unacceptable. Wyze, I’m looking for a solution.
The “months” is if you have basically unusably conservative settings. The 2K resolution will take more battery, but not sure if it explains the difference between your old and new lifespan or not. Is there anyone else that has access that might be watching live stream?
Did your old doorbell have AI features? Keep in mind every motion has to be uploaded to Wyze for analysis and then either discarded or sent to you as an alert. So maybe you’re capturing a lot of motion that is being discarded, but still uses battery. Decreasing your detection zone and/or sensitivity may help.
I forgot to mention, I’m not using 2k, I have it set down to 360P. I have the detection zone set pretty conservatively - the street, squares near the street, and sky are excluded. It’s basically just my porch and the walk leading to the porch, so I don’t think this problem is a lot of extraneous motion. I’d be happy to get 1 month at this point, or heck, even 2 full weeks.
And yes, my old Wyze Pro battery doorbell had AI features, which I used. I had it set up similarly… if anything, I had it set a bit less conservatively, power-wise.
Try turning on “other motion” effectively overriding AI and see how many you get. May clue you in to whether that is part of the issue or not. You’d be surprised how many shadows from people walking by can hit your walkway in the morning etc.
Every one of those is getting sent an analyzed whether you get alerted or not.
Good idea, let’s see how it does with that tomorrow. (I’ll report back in the next day or two) As I said, with my previous Wyze doorbell camera, configured properly this was not a problem so I suspect it won’t be with the duo either, but… we’ll see.
My duo battery will only last a week as well. I have basically set it to all the suggestions. Paid for the extra battery etc. This is defective and no amount of settings help. It is strange to think that they would have all this capability that you cant use. And even with all the conservative steps- batter still doesnt last a week. There is a major issue here
Well good idea on trying to turn off the AI events and to see what motion it’s picking up. It’s constantly, constantly picking up motion that is nowhere near (as in several squares away from) my selected zone and is fully within the grayed-out zone. Seems like the detection zone just isn’t working at all for me. I’ve tried setting the sensitivity to both the min and max, with no effect. There’s a street in front of my house and it’s triggering on every car driving by even though only my porch and a few feet in front are in the detection zone and absolutely nothing is happening in the detection zone. Wouldn’t be that bad given that the AI works pretty well except for the fact that I need to use this thing on battery, and would like to be able to get… say… at least a month.
Wyze, can you push an update to get the detection zone working properly?
Not thinking this thru when I first setup, I inserted the SD card and the battery died in under 3 days, doh! I removed SD card, recharged and made the following changes. Using ‘Customize Recordings’ for Record/Notify: Only checked Person, Glass Breaking and Gunshot (my milk delivery box was setting off as a Package). Under ‘Detection Settings’ I’ve enabled Detection Zone and narrowed the area to just my walkway to the front door. Motion Detection Sensitivity set at 4.
It’s been 5 days and it’s at 94%! I’ve had at least one activation daily and I’ve kept it at 2K, but may drop down if more activity drains the battery too fast.
That’s essentially what I already have (and no SD card). Glad it’s working for you! I’ve got a pretty restrictive detection zone, a low sensitivity, and only a few things enabled to record and I’m down to 37% after 5 days. 
Double check and make sure you don’t have “other sounds” enabled (or maybe totally disable sound). I guess your events list would tell you if it was picking up motion or sound though, but never know.
There were issues with some cams where the motion it detects “activated” a large area of the view, cameras that support motion tagging you could see the green box going into the detection zone even though the motion didn’t, but I’m not sure if that doorbell has the motion tagging feature or not (I know at least some of them don’t). But if you can enable that it might tell you whether that’s the issue or not.
As far as firmware update, you’ll need to generate a log file then open a case with Wyze support to investigate it.
I suppose you could try reducing your detection zone by 1 square all around the perimeter, maybe if it is picking up stuff “near” it that would result in the zone you’re looking for, but just speculating.
The first week I installed the duo cam doorbell, I got only about one week out of the battery. I had to really tweak settings to get the battery not to drain quickly.
I’ve got mine only detecting people and packages for now, and the battery only lasts two weeks. Also, it’s detecting motion at night for some reason and sending the notification to only the plug in chime, and not my phone, which is rather odd. Nothing is in my log either. I don’t know if that may be attributing to the battery drain.
I wish they didn’t upsell this and say the battery would last three months, because it’s clearly a false claim. I’d like to know what settings gets you three months of battery. Help Wyze.
AI detection doesn’t save battery, in fact it often uses more if there is a lot of motion that it has to analyze and filter out. If you turn on “other motion” (and if you have sound events enabled, “other sounds” also) then you’ll see all the alerts it is having to analyze and filter, if there are a lot, you need to take steps to eliminate those with detection zone, sensitivity, angle, etc.
Have a look at the post below which appears that having detection zone enabled causes sound events to trigger even if turned off. I’m guessing that if you have AI detection it is then filtering them out, but still using battery analyzing them, but just a hypothesis.
I hate to state the obvious. If you have to scale back to all but the most basic features of this and still only get a week is it really worth having? whatever- there is a major problem here. My older doorbell from wizen lasted more than a month- I was drawn in on thinking this could go at least a couple months- It goes a week
good find-the sound/detection zone could be contributing to my problem in some way, although I have sound recording turned off right now in an attempt to find a combination that slows down the battery burn (and I’m not seeing any sound events triggering, just motion) . If so, they really need to fix it ASAP, since if you don’t live in a quiet area and live on a street that gets traffic, you really need to ignore sounds AND use a detection zone, together, in order to not make the battery worthless.
This all worked perfectly fine on my old Wyze battery cam pro, for some reason, pretty sure I got at least 2 months from that.
All the battery cams have tradeoffs, I remember friends buying Blink cams which are supposed to go for months then turning everything on and them lasting 3 days off expensive Energizer Lithium batteries. Even with moderate settings a couple weeks was all they’d get. But you should be able to use reasonable settings and get quite a while out of it. Seems there are some known issues causing it to detect things it shouldn’t and that will certainly eat up the battery.
I think it’s this:
The detection zones and sensitivity is off. It’s not using it correctly. I think that’s causing the battery drain. The battery should last a good long while. Basically the same battery is in the Battery Cam Pro’s and they last a good amount of time.
Right, as I said, I had the very similar Wyze doorbell pro in the same place with similar settings (less aggressively battery saving settings, if anything) and got probably 2 months… it was long enough that I didn’t really care, might have been three months. This week I only made it 6 days before needing to charge. They need to fix this ASAP. I agree it’s probably something with the detection zone.
I am having the same issue, my battery is only lasting a few days. I replaced the doorbell pro with this one.
Everyone in this thread with this issue needs to submit a log to Wyze and open a support ticket, that’s the only way it is going to get attention.