Best dashcam for LONG periods of parking?

Minkadink

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What is the best dashcam set up for long periods of parking? I have access only to on-street parking on a narrow road and bumps and scrapes happen all to often! I got caught out the other day. Problem is, i only drive my car perhaps twice or three times per week and not for more than 10-20 minutes each time i pop to the supermarket or to run errands. ITs only every fortnight i have to do a long journey for 6 hour round trip. So really, my need is for parking surveillance mostly.

Having done some research i found the Thinkware f800 Pro to be offering the best option for parking modes but correct me if im wrong? The model can take a 120GB SD card. Im surprised that many dashcams dont take more?? Why is this?

  1. So what is the best dashcam for long periods of parking?
  2. What is the best 'parking mode' to capture knocks and scrapes? i.e. what settings are best for my situation (like, buffering, Frames Per seconds adjustment etc). it may help to know that cars driving on my road belong to neighbors and so any car captured knocking/scraping my car will probably be easy to find as they will probably be parked on my road or at least in the next street.
  3. Will i need a battery (or three) to increase capacity? If so, are they all compatible?
  4. If the camera drains most of the car battery during parking mode, how long do i need to drive the car before the car battery is fully charged again? (assuming the battering is in good condition)
if you could help me answer these questions i would be most grateful!

thank you all.
 
regular use of parking mode for days at a time is going to be a challenge if you want it to actually catch an event, you have a choice of running out of memory and losing what you capture, or saving space but reducing your chance of capturing the event, either one is secondary to your bigger problem of how to effectively power it for days at a time
 
You would be better off putting a CCTV camera on the house / apartment aimed at where the car are parked.
I do this myself with a PTZ camera mounted on my #2 floor balcony door, and aimed at the car in the back yard, i also have another camera aimed at the front side of the building and the street, but i don't park there.
With a 2TB hard drive in the recorder i have plenty of hours on record before the NVR start to delete older recordings like a dashcam.

And i use a PTZ camera ( Pan Tilt Zoom ) as i don't always park in the same spot, and i am zoomed in good on the car so i have a chance of identifying a person next to it.

 
1. Most dashcams require driving every day to maintain 24/7 operation. Most of the exceptions sleep most of the time and only wake up after the g-sensor detects an impact, and by the time they start recording it is often too late. The Thinkware U1000 with optional Radar sensor doesn't fall in either category, but make sure you read all the problem threads since there are not many people impressed with the results given the price. The alternative is to run the camera off a USB powerbank and swap the powerbank daily with one charged in the house, then you can use most dashcams, but of course some are more reliable at correctly detecting incidents than others, and a few have a low-bitrate parking mode that is guaranteed to record every incident (Viofo A129 and Blueskysea B1W).

2. No collision detection parking mode can guarantee to record every incident, and most record a lot of non-incidents. Timelapse modes will record everything, but you need a fairly high frame rate to be sure of catching plates and most timelapse modes do not record sound, sound can be very important. So I favor low-bitrate which will record everything and does record sound.

3. If you want 24/7 and are not driving every day, then the real problem is charging the batteries fast enough, unless you take them into the house to charge.

4. Depends on the type of battery. Conventional lead acid batteries about 6 hours for a full charge, but 2 hours for 90% would probably do for your use given that it is going not going to manage the 24/7 with only 2 or 3 drives per week anyway. AGM batteries are a lot faster for the initial charge, maybe an hour for 90%, but they still take several hours for a 100% charge, which should be done occasionally for both types to keep the battery healthy. Lithium batteries can charge a lot faster, but they are very expensive for a big enough one that also has a fast enough charge rate. Lithium USB powerbanks can be big enough and cheap, but don't charge fast enough, unless you charge them in the house overnight in which case even a basic one will charge fast enough.
 
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