Wyze Outdoor Cam Keeps going dead. FAST!

A little over a month ago, I set up a Wyze Cam Outdoor hub with four Outdoor Cams. Everything was working great for about a week.

One Outdoor Cam went from working fine to dead almost instantly. I recharged it thinking it was a fluke, but it kept losing connection and apparently dying very rapidly. It did this repeatedly.

I reached out to Wyze, and they quickly replaced the problem camera. Unfortunately, now that I replaced it, it’s acting even worse. It was fine for a day, then on day 2, it showed a drop to 91% battery. Then it lost connection altogether. I got up on a ladder to power cycle it, and it showed the battery was at 0%, and to charge immediately. I recharged it, and tried again. I made it less than two days. I have it charging again right now.

What could be using the camera to drop almost all battery so suddenly? The detection settings and activity level have been moderate.

I’ve had all cameras lose connection here and there, which is frustrating. I’ve also yet to see a single camera go past 3 weeks on a single charge, let alone 3-6 months. This one camera just keep being overly problematic.

Thanks in advance for all thoughts.

  • Brian

Welcome @brianmurphy35

Couple of thoughts off the top of my head.

#1 Distance from Base: is the cam far away from the base and struggling to stay connected? This can cause more power consumption?
#1.1 Is your Base connected Wifi or Hardwired?
#2 Cool down: The least amount of time in the cool down, the faster power is consumed.
#3 Back up to base turned on?

In the past I have seen cold weather attribute to power drain, but only in prolonged cold weather. Don’t suppose that is the case this time of year though, depending on your geoloc.

Tagging @Antonius to add some more thoughts. A super WCO user :slight_smile: we have had multiple power consumption conversations.

It depends on what the cams are doing. Are they recording events all the time or do they just die sitting there? I think the biggest cause is low wi-fi signal from the base, you can check on the app and see how the signal is to the cams (PIC Below). My base is connected via ethernet and I have never had an issue with battery drain, my only issue is I can’t download the event videos (again) even with a new base. Do you have cam plus on the cams? Since I can not download the event videos from the cloud I now have all 4 cameras set on scheduled event recording to the SD card in the cam. They are set for 10 days right now, no cooldown period and 2 minute max video length. The batteries drop about 1%-2% a day with 10 or so events a day on each.
Personally I would remove everything from the app, sign out of you account, force close the app, open the app again, sign back into you account and add the base and cams back on.
Does you wi-fi to the cams look like this ?: I charge my cams when they get to about 40-45% which is usually 7-8 weeks.

Thanks for the answers. The camera is in a spot where it usually gets about 1 bar of signal. So I know it’s a bit weak.

My Wyze hub is hardwired via Ethernet.

I’m using Cam Plus, no back up to base.

The camera in question usually picks up an average of a dozen events a day, so I din’t feel the usage is excessive.

I’m just puzzled why it goes from 90% battery to dead after about 2 days. That doesn’t make much sense to me.

Can you put one of your other camera in the same location and test to see if that one dies very fast also. Put the problem cam in a location where it will have at least 2 bars of signal and see if it still dies fast. It is a simple way to find out if the weak signal is killing it or if it is another issue, just a thought and what I would do.