can two v3 be wired for parking mode?

[SawMaster]

I'm talking parking time only. No limits on recording when driving as your alternator keep enough juice flowing for everything.

Phil

 

[sltwtr]

@SawMaster i just try to understand how it works exactly. it will get about 8 hours of parking (on the V3) until i'll run my car again? how does it work?..
can i easily shut off parking mode? (it doesn't need to be in parking mode when parked at home).
can you tell me (really in short) what is the problem of using 60fps not on bright day light?

 

[SawMaster]

You'll just have to try 30fps and 60fps and see what you think. Sometimes it's a notable difference but usually there's not a lot of difference. Part will be your seasonal natural lighting and part will be how much you drive at night and how well lit that is. Neither setting is magic for every situation.

With 60fps there is less time for each frame to 'grab' adequate light for making a good image. At 30fps it's exposed longer and thus captures more light to work with. Dashcam auto exposure is more able to get good pics daytime than night at either setting, but at night it's working at it's limits, while daytime it's working at the center of it's range. Sometimes 60fps just isn't giving it all the light it needs at night.

With good daylighting 60fps can reduce motion blur on fast-moving oncoming cars letting you see a few more plate numbers than 30fps, yet sometimes 30fps will get a plate that 60fps doesn't, so you just have to try each for yourself. Either of the cams we're discussing will hive very good images for dashcams at either setting so I wouldn't worry too much over FPS. Just try each and see what you prefer.

Phil

 

[sltwtr]

@SawMaster big thanks for the detailed explanation. i'm just wondering about two more things, if you can assist:
it will get about 8 hours of parking (on the V3) until i'll run my car again? how does it work exactly?..
can i easily shut off parking mode? (it doesn't need to be in parking mode when parked at home).

 

[sltwtr]

@SawMaster just to clarify, if both cameras take 1 ampere together when on parking mode and the battery is 55 ampere, then its supposed to have 27 hours of parking time mode (about 50% of 55 ampere), no?...

 

[SawMaster]

You can turn parking mode off manually with a button press on the cam. If you fit two V3's you have to reach the rear cam too- bot just the front- but with the Plus both cams are controlled by the front unit.

Parking mode uses a "Hardwire kit" (HWK) wired into the fusebox with fuse-taps. The control box on the HWK has a movable switch which allows you to select at what voltage you want the cams to shut down at. Lacking this the cams would run till your battery was dead. Lead/acid car batteries will experience a shortened service life if they drop past half of their capacity. Over time with use that capacity slowly drops until you need a new battery. With a new car battery a setting of 12.0 volts on the HWK will be at or just under that 50% capacity mark. The 12.2V setting puts less strain on the battery and is as low as we generally recommend. over the years as battery wear sets in that can be too low, and a setting of 12.4V is better. The higher you set the cutoff voltage the less recording time you'll get. At 12.4V you may get only 3-4 hours, at 12.2V you might get 6-8 hours, and at 12.0V 8-12 hours. These numbers are for a single cam (A129 plus counts as single here). 2 A119V3's will be 2 cams and need 2 HWK's; you'll get less recording time at an equal cut-off setting going this way.

Another effect of that setting is battery service life. Using any amount of parking mode reduces service life, but really low settings like 12.0V can reduce it's life by 40%-50%. Since car batteries aren't cheap that can add up fast. At 12.2V you might see a 20% loss of service life. Broken down to daily cost that's like $0.50 to $0.75 per day with some car batteries going higher. Larger batteries of course do better as do AGM type batteries. Some cars now come with an AGM battery, and most cars can be fitted with one as a direct replacement for the original. It might be worth upgrading to AGM when you need to replace your battery; many dashcammers do that. It's not an absolute necessity though; standard car batteries do OK. If you're really worried about car battery life then a setting of 12.4V is prodent; you'll hardly noting any service life loss, but you won't get a lot of parking mode time.

You can also use powerbanks tio run the cam while parked, but that's another subject altogether which takes a bit to cover all on it's own. Many people do this though as it eliminates using the car battery for parking mode, letting you get full service life from it, but at the cost of your powerbank set-up.

Phil

 

[sltwtr]

You can turn parking mode off manually with a button press on the cam. If you fit two V3's you have to reach the rear cam too- bot just the front- but with the Plus both cams are controlled by the front unit.

Parking mode uses a "Hardwire kit" (HWK) wired into the fusebox with fuse-taps. The control box on the HWK has a movable switch which allows you to select at what voltage you want the cams to shut down at. Lacking this the cams would run till your battery was dead. Lead/acid car batteries will experience a shortened service life if they drop past half of their capacity. Over time with use that capacity slowly drops until you need a new battery. With a new car battery a setting of 12.0 volts on the HWK will be at or just under that 50% capacity mark. The 12.2V setting puts less strain on the battery and is as low as we generally recommend. over the years as battery wear sets in that can be too low, and a setting of 12.4V is better. The higher you set the cutoff voltage the less recording time you'll get. At 12.4V you may get only 3-4 hours, at 12.2V you might get 6-8 hours, and at 12.0V 8-12 hours. These numbers are for a single cam (A129 plus counts as single here). 2 A119V3's will be 2 cams and need 2 HWK's; you'll get less recording time at an equal cut-off setting going this way.

Another effect of that setting is battery service life. Using any amount of parking mode reduces service life, but really low settings like 12.0V can reduce it's life by 40%-50%. Since car batteries aren't cheap that can add up fast. At 12.2V you might see a 20% loss of service life. Broken down to daily cost that's like $0.50 to $0.75 per day with some car batteries going higher. Larger batteries of course do better as do AGM type batteries. Some cars now come with an AGM battery, and most cars can be fitted with one as a direct replacement for the original. It might be worth upgrading to AGM when you need to replace your battery; many dashcammers do that. It's not an absolute necessity though; standard car batteries do OK. If you're really worried about car battery life then a setting of 12.4V is prodent; you'll hardly noting any service life loss, but you won't get a lot of parking mode time.

You can also use powerbanks tio run the cam while parked, but that's another subject altogether which takes a bit to cover all on it's own. Many people do this though as it eliminates using the car battery for parking mode, letting you get full service life from it, but at the cost of your powerbank set-up.

Phil

you're truly awesome. thank you so much for assisting me to decide here.

 

[SawMaster]

@SawMaster just to clarify, if both cameras take 1 ampere together when on parking mode and the battery is 55 ampere, then its supposed to have 27 hours of parking time mode (about 50% of 55), no?...

No. Amperes are how things are usually rated, but "Watts" is the factor you really figure run-time from. This has to do with "Ohm's law" which is the mathematical relationship between Amps, Watts, and Voltage. Since a battery loses voltage in use, the relationship changes, so 27.5A becomes more than half of the 55A you started with.

Phil

 

[sltwtr]

@SawMaster
you're right, turning off the parking mode in the back camera is a hassle.
we can live with 3-4 hours of parking mode (12.4v) to not harm the battery.
question is, i understood that the battery will recharge after 5-10 minutes of driving.
if say the car is parked at home for more than 4 hours (and it will stop consuming power), will the cameras work when i only start to drive?
i guess you do, but you know this table from viofo right? Does it reflect your data?

 

[SawMaster]

All I can do is relate my own experiences. My van has an 80A battery and I used to run one cam continuously. If I went more than about 38-40 hours without running the van it was a toss-up if it would start. In the winter it was more like 30-35 hours. Maybe a little more when the battery was new, and considerable less in it's last year of use. That deep usage cost me 20%-25% of the service life of a mid-grade standard battery. I've been driving that type of van since they were new in 1975, and have owned several of them through the years including now. I am very gamiliar with them so I know that their battery service life is right at 5 years with a good grade of battery. Running my dashcam cut that down to 4 years the first replacement and a few months short of that the next. That one has gone around 3 1/2 year now and includes a couple times with me leaving the headlights on killing it. I can barely get 8-10 hours parking time with one cam now. I'm in a safe neighborhood now so my usual is to set my A139 timer to 3 hours parking so I can make the best of what life is left in the battery. It;s HWK is set to 12.2V which gives it about 4+ hours recording with the timer off.

If you dig back in these forums you'll find I'm one of the first people to run a dashcam continuously as back then I couldn't afford a HWK and the cam I used had no real parking mode. Amid many predictions of doom and gloom from experienced users I discovered the dangers were over-rated, and as I added cams to my system I found out just how far things can be pushed and what the affects of doing that are. I've gone to using GWK's now and again have experimented with runtimes more than almost anyone else has. I trued 12.0V with a new battery and it was too much. I won't use any selling less than 12.2V now. I tried a 12.4V setting and got about 7 hours with the battery new, but was down to 3 hours after a couple months. At 12.2V I got 16 hours parking with my A139 but that pushes the battery too hard, and really 8 hours is about all I can get now without detecting the starter motor turning slower than it should. At that point the battery is below 50% charged, probanly more like 40% and that does damage to a battery fast. Not all due to dashcams but this battery won't see more than 2-3 months more life. Luckily it's a relatively cheap battery at ~$125 for a mid-grade replacement. For awhile I've had second vehicles with smaller batteries similar to yours and have noted the differences, but really didn't know the expected service life of the battery or the age of the battery in it so couldn't directly compare.

You may get 24 hours with 2 V3's if your battery is brand new but you won't get it for long. I think my numbers are far more accurate than what you've been quoted.

Phil

 

[sltwtr]

@SawMaster thank you. it's 5am in my country and i can hardly concentrate. i try to push it. we don't always move our car daily, so I'd like to have easy access to the parking mode shut down button.
1. alternatively i can just put a timer for parking mode?
2. i edited my messages (wrote some and deleted quickly because i realize my info is wrong) but maybe you saw the deleted messages instead of my last massage and responded to that.
this is what i recently wrote here:
you're right, turning off the parking mode in the back camera is a hassle.
we can live with 3-4 hours of parking mode (12.4v) to not harm the battery.
question is, i understood that the battery will recharge after 5-10 minutes of driving.
if say the car is parked at home for more than 4 hours (and it will stop consuming power), will the cameras work when i only start to drive?
i guess you do, but you know this table from viofo right? Does it reflect your data?

 

[Karagandinez]

1. alternatively i can just put a timer for parking mode?

In the last firmware you can set the parking timer.

 

[SawMaster]

In the last firmware you can set the parking timer.

Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware of that. However I see a couple posts about the latest V3 FW giving start-up problems and Viofo support recommending a rollback to earlier FW to solve that for now.

@sltwtr With a HWK whenever you start the car it will begin normal recording automatically. All dashcams with a HWK work that way.

Normally it takes about 15 minutes of driving to bring a car battery up to a near-full charge, which is the state of charge most car batteries function in. A truly full charge takes about an hour's drive. So for practical purposes a 15 minute drive is enough.

Either the parking mode timer function or the low voltage cut-off in the HWK will protect your battery equally well. Since you will be using a HWK I'd recommend detting it to 12.4V initially and see how long that gives you in parking mode. If it's not long enough set it to 12.2V which will most certainly give you 3-4 hours and likely more. With your 55A battery a 12.2V setting might lose around 10% or 15% of the battery service life but that's not significant- just a couple months of service. Roughly under $0.25 per day for parking protection if my early morning mental math is correct. You decide if the cost is worth it.

I've looked at the data table from Viofo and the numbers seem accurate. When you use watt-hours to calculate cam runtime you'll be more accurate. A car battery is considered filly depleted at around 12.0V. At a full state of charge when it's new you'll see around 13.8V fully charged. A battery near the end of it's service life will be far less when fully charged, maybe as low as 12.6V. Through all this the amperage number remains roughly constant, but the wattage changes considerably in it's exponential relationship to voltage as per "Ohm's law" of how these figures relate to each other. At lower voltages there's considerably less wattage available. I don't know why amperage is generally the figure seen for automotive work, in any other application such as home appliances and industrial motors you see wattage figures, not amperage. As long as the circuit can supply enough amperage it's the wattage which determines runtime in cars.

My numbers are based on my real-world experience as well as what I read from numerous other members here and elsewhere who like me have been using dashcams for many years. There are a lot of variables involved with this such as battery quality, battery age, temperature extremes (both hot and cold) where the car is at, normal state of charge for the battery (roughly relates to usual driving times and driving/parking habits and how big the alternator is), and all these differences can change things considerably, maybe 30% or more between ideal conditions and worst conditions. So no chart can really tell you much with good accuracy. And though Viofo is an honest company you must bear in mind that they would want to list optimistic numbers to enhance sales rather than worst-case scenario numbers which would look bad. I'm sure somewhere they have a disclaimer of accuracy for the chart telling you that your results may vary. If they didn't they would be flooded with cams being returned when the chart numbers couldn't be met. Some other dashcam and powerbank manufacturers give you estimated runtimes, and almost nobody ever gets them. You decide who and what to believe. Read these forums and other sites on dashcams and you'll see what is said. You can get the 3-4 hours you want without problems, but you won't get 24 hours without problems once the battery has aged.

Phil

 

[Karagandinez]

Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware of that. However I see a couple posts about the latest V3 FW giving start-up problems and Viofo support recommending a rollback to earlier FW to solve that for now.

The timer is, but the interval is too big: 12, 24 and 48 hours.
And not only on the last firmware.

 

[sltwtr]

@SawMaster i decided to go for the a129 plus duo (cyber monday is over thank god), simply because i realised i might have to press the shut off button for parking mode very often. Now i realise from what you said that that its not an issue and not needed, because even when parking mode is on for a few hours, it will still start capturing video immediately when ill start driving, and since most of the times i drive for more than 10 minutes to my destination. i guess that by the time ill arrive there, the battery could get charged enough to give another 3-4 hours of parking mode? Am i roughly right?
I cant change my desicion now but it would be nice to know for sure.

Anyway, as i already said again and again, thank you so much, you gave me so much info. That isnt taken for granted.

 

[Nigel]

because even when parking mode is on for a few hours, it will still start capturing video immediately when ill start driving, and since most of the times i drive for more than 10 minutes to my destination. i guess that by the time ill arrive there, the battery could get charged enough to give another 3-4 hours of parking mode? Am i roughly right?

Yes it will start recording immediately.

10 minutes is enough for 3-4 hours, but you might need to set the cutoff voltage lower. The battery will charge faster if it is more empty, at 12.4 volts I am not sure it will charge fast enough for 3-4 hours in 10 minutes, at 12.2 I would expect no problems. If you have an AGM battery then you can use 12.0, then 5 minutes is probably enough.

 

[Karagandinez]

Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware of that. However I see a couple posts about the latest V3 FW giving start-up problems and Viofo support recommending a rollback to earlier FW to solve that for now.

I installed this firmware. Here the parking mode is adjusted by time: from 30 minutes to 48 hours.