Is there a good battery pack which will simply plug into a 12v socket and the itself has a 12v female socket for the dash cam's plug to go into?
David,
I recently had the similar query as you my friend after I purchased a BlackVue dashcam. Since I garage my vehicle, I wanted a secondary battery that completely by-passes the vehicle battery when I infrequently go out of town when my car is parked at the airport. Being retired military, I just needed the parking mode aspect very infrequently, So spending good money on something Im not going to use much seemed foolish for my needs.
I looked at a lot of battery packs such as the Blackvue Power Magic.
I scoffed at the $200 price tag, for what it is, that's outrageous. So I went looking in my electrical parts bin and found a 12volt 10amp vehicle portable Jump Pack someone gave me a decade ago, a perfect candidate as it has two cigarette lighter plug ins as well as 5v USB. I fluked the battery and it was .52 volts after charging.
Dismantled it, and low and behold it had a UPC 12v 10amp APC type of battery. I have solar and I have no shortage of UPC batteries. So I put in a fresh battery, removed the jumper cables as they weren't needed. Bolted it to my Murano's Secureit Fast Box and ran the wires to the front, the connector I put in the huge glove box, so I can plug it in when I go out of town, the rest of the time it runs off the primary vehicle battery. I did however by that $15 Power Magic Pro Battery Discharge Prevention Device, just in case. I could have made it myself, but for $15 that saved me some time.
Today I'm going fabricate a small solar trickle charge for the Jump pack so it can be stand alone and not worry about charging it. What's comical is that the $200 Blackvue battery pack is 3amps. This jump pack is almost three times the runtime and it only cost me $20 for the new UPC battery cell and $15 for the discharge devise.
Maybe down the road I'll link the secondary battery to the main battery, but I'll see if I want to go that route after seeing real world power uses for the Blackvue and the batteries' actual use. Strangely, I couldn't easily locate the power draw of my Blackvue unit at Blackvues website, but that's not important, I'll figure it out. The pic below is just the jump pack after I removed the jumper cables and bolted it in the boot. The jump pack was gathering dust for a decade, never a bad thing to repurpose junk to something useful.
PS< I appreciate the wisdom of all you Dashcam people, before I bought my dashcam I did a fair bit of research, a lot of it came from here, so I appreciate your communities wealth of knowledge.