This is just a heads up for those with the Eufy Cam 2 and Eufy Cam 2 Pro
I have numerous wireless cameras at home, a mix of Cam 2 and Cam 2 Pro’s. I’m still using the base stations with removable storage using micro SD cards and a battery backup. I personally prefer these base stations due to the storage expandability and the battery backup because if there’s a power failure the base station still works even though there’s no external power.
Anyways to my point, If you have any wireless camera’s a long distance from there assigned base station, the battery life of the camera will suffer. I have a camera located almost 1 acre away (just over 200ft) in length from the base station, from my testing the batteries life will suffer. I’ve changed many settings and even switched from Cam 2 and Cam 2 pro’s and there battery life suffer.
My conclusion is that the fact of the distance. The longer distance is using more battery power to transmit to the base station it is assigned too. I also compared the signal strengths of the two cameras and the Cam2 has a better long distance signal strength than the Cam2 Pro. But back to the original issue is the battery life.
The cameras I have installed on the home that are not to far from there assigned base stations have a lot of battery life. I currently have a solar panel ordered to be installed on the cam that’s the farthest away from its base station. Once this solar panel is installed I’m going to watching battery life and slowly changing the camera settings to increase the video quality as I reduced it to save battery life and that did not help.
Note: Battery usage with wireless Eufy cams
This looks valuable information, makes sense to me, although don’t have Eufy cams.
Correct, radio signals deteriorate with inverse square of distance, meaning e.g. 200ft needs 16 times the energy of 50ft. On the other hand, obstructions, or lack thereof helps too.
Energy is linear on frequency so if you have any flexibility (I think you don’t with Eufy) the lowest frequency the better.
I can tell you already know about distance but there is another source of energy consumption - induction. Any metal near either antenna (camera, base) will absorb the signal and re-transmit it. It’s basically how reflection on parabolic dishes work, but if not shaped like a dish then it re-radiates in all directions and at a distance the original and the reflection roughly cancel out or “block” a signal. This effect is also inverse-square so any distance you can put from metal helps, even just a few inches further from the wire in the pole / wall helps, most so at distance. I’ve tuned people’s home Wifi and simply moving their router (not a homebase but similar physics) a few inches from the wall made the signal at end of garden go from 1 to 3 bars.
Join and post here below too, it’s focused on these products, here you’re among all Anker products fans, so below is largely a subset of who’s here, but critically is actively read by Eufy staff (unlike here).