Need A Better Dash Cam After Car Being Hit On Christmas Eve

not a fan of these but why not use the one you are using now in that case?

yes it can do parking mode on a 2 wire power supply, the low voltage cutoff point is the problem with these though, 11.6v will leave you stranded at some point
I can't, as it's got a motion on sensor built into it.

I've not had an issue with the voltage cutoff yet. And sometimes I don't use the car for a few days.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/B07JB4JB3Q
 
11.6v is still too low to run a battery down regularly, will take its toll at some point, hey it's your money though, go right ahead if that's what you want
 
11.6v is still too low to run a battery down regularly, will take its toll at some point, hey it's your money though, go right ahead if that's what you want
I'm not trying to being funny with you. Sorry if that's how it came across. I'm new to all this and just going of my very limited experience with my Aukey DR02 D and googling etc.
What voltage would you recommend then?

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What voltage would you recommend then?
the Viofo hardwire kit has selectable low voltage cutoff points at 11.8v, 12v, 12.2v, 12.4v, honestly it's the best way to go if using their camera, it's not expensive, if you're going to do it you're better to do it properly and be done with it
 
the Viofo hardwire kit has selectable low voltage cutoff points at 11.8v, 12v, 12.2v, 12.4v, honestly it's the best way to go if using their camera, it's not expensive, if you're going to do it you're better to do it properly and be done with it
If that kit goes as low as 11.8v, then surely 11.6v can't be that bad, can it?

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I would not go under 12.2 volts for cut off, this should mean you have a fairly easy descending life curve of your battery life, the same using a 11.8 volt cut off your curve would look like a steep staircase..

Last year in the fairly warm spring i only got 5-6 hours of parking mode using 12.4 volts, lowering that to 12.2 did give me a lot more time, but only something like 10 - 12 hours.
I have not checked what i get now with temperatures around freezing, but it got to be less.
I am not going to use 11.8 volts on a lead acid battery like i have, but it might be something you can do on a AGM battery, without ruining the battery fast.

Lead acid batteries are not really meant to be discharged, though fork lifts do run on the same kind of batteries, then they are not really run down and i even think a electric fork lift have a low voltage cut off.
 
In a nut shell, regularly depleting the battery to a low level affects the overall health of the battery which is why the recommendation is to not go below 12v.

I’m also not a fan of the OBD powered connectors, I know you’ve had no problems but that is the heartljne to the ECU of the car so if anything goes wrong then you’re risking damaging one of the ECU components.

In terms of where the car was parked, if outside your house then it has to be a neighbour or a visiting relative. Look out for a red car.
 
I would only recommend a OBD connector if the person had no DIY skills to do a proper 3 wire hard wire install, or not being able to pay someone to do it.
It is nice and easy, and i think you can do a 3 wire OBD kit too if need be, anywho just like regular hard wire kits, you have to be careful about poor quality generic kits, i would prefer a HW kit from the camera brand any day.
 
Best to not let your car battery get below 12.4V or you will lose some of it's service life. But that won't give you lots of parking recording time, so you have to trade some battery life if you want more time. I personally think 12.2V is a good compromise, and 12.0V can be acceptable knowing that you may be replacing your battery 20% sooner than if you ran no cams. Also not that many folks have measured variances of + or - 0.2V with their kits, so best to actually measure the voltage after selecting your setting :rolleyes:

I've got a large but cheap battery and I push the limits pretty hard. I've done the math based on what my previous battery did and those results came to be a cost of about $0.25 per day per cam ($0.50 per day for a 2-channel cam). I'm OK with that but if I had a car which used a small expensive model-specific battery them I might not be OK with the cost numbers it produced :(

The average single-channel cam draws in the neighborhood of under 1AH in recording. To make the math easier, and to make sure any errors are on the safe side that's the figure I used with my calculations though most actually draw around .75AH ;) I have an 80AH battery which costs about $140 today (it was $110 when I did my figures). You begin shortening a lead-acid car starting batteries service life when you draw more than 10% of it's capacity, so I'm safe with 8 hours of single cam recording. I use double that figure for a 2-channel cam though it's probably more like 1.5AH draw, again just to play safe. And I record about 12 hours every night, so I'm using somewhere around 20% of the battery capacity, which is going to shorten the battery life about 10%- the excess amount over the safe level. I know I get around 5 years service with the battery and no cams because I've driven this style of van for over 20 years now, so you can figure my costs from there (it's too early in the morning for me and math today :p)

I never checked voltages so I can't say about them any more than to note that those numbers I recommend seem to align closely with my actual experiences. And since I'm not using any type of low-battery-cutoff, there have been a few instances where I forget to turn my cams off and killed the battery along with a few other times where my headlights did similar :eek: I can use one of my tool batteries to get myself going since it's my workvan, but the average driver would need to carry a jump-pack for similar results. Because of the excessive abuse my 2-year old battery is getting quite weak and will need replacing in no more than a couple months time. Ouch. And a good lesson for others about why you should have and use a HWK with a sensible cut-off setting, especially if your vehicle has a small battery the way most now do :cool:

Phil
 
In a nut shell, regularly depleting the battery to a low level affects the overall health of the battery which is why the recommendation is to not go below 12v.

I’m also not a fan of the OBD powered connectors, I know you’ve had no problems but that is the heartljne to the ECU of the car so if anything goes wrong then you’re risking damaging one of the ECU components.

In terms of where the car was parked, if outside your house then it has to be a neighbour or a visiting relative. Look out for a red car.
I checked all the red cars near by straight away. No joy.

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No one up or down the road that have a CCTV camera aimed at the street ?
 
What about batteries that have a reserve capacity, how does that work?

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I finally made a decision and decided to go with the VIOFO A129 and the 3 wire hardwire kit. I also ordered an extra CPL filter for rear camera too.
With the fuse taps added as well, the total was £183 from Amazon.
I did consider ordering it from AliExpress, as it's available for quite a bit less. But I didn't think it was the risk, if I needed to send it back for any reason.

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You’d probably have got stung for excise duty so not worth the hassle in my opinion.

Has to be a visiting relative in that case unless you live somewhere where random people park, like close to the shops etc.
 
I am of the opinion that dashcam power should be completely independent of the car battery, hence I got a cheap LiFePO4 battery from Amazon for ~$90 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/B07KPYSN3S) and from my initial testing am pleased with the results. It is rated for 166Wh which means it can go for days recording intermittent events. I have plugged my dashcam into this battery and haven't touched the cigarette port of the car at all.

The only drawback is, by not hardwiring the dashcam to the car, it doesn't get a signal to switch from regular mode to parking mode, so I have to manually toggle between the two every time. A very small price to pay for an inexpensive battery solution which has tremendous capacity to keep dashcam powered for days.
 
I am of the opinion that dashcam power should be completely independent of the car battery, hence I got a cheap LiFePO4 battery from Amazon for ~$90 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/B07KPYSN3S) and from my initial testing am pleased with the results. It is rated for 166Wh which means it can go for days recording intermittent events. I have plugged my dashcam into this battery and haven't touched the cigarette port of the car at all.

The only drawback is, by not hardwiring the dashcam to the car, it doesn't get a signal to switch from regular mode to parking mode, so I have to manually toggle between the two every time. A very small price to pay for an inexpensive battery solution which has tremendous capacity to keep dashcam powered for days.
A couple firmware revisions back, Viofo added parking mode support to installations not using the 3-wire kit. It will enter parking mode after 5 minutes of no detected movement of the vehicle via the GPS

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A couple firmware revisions back, Viofo added parking mode support to installations not using the 3-wire kit. It will enter parking mode after 5 minutes of no detected movement of the vehicle via the GPS

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Is this true? WOW! I need to give it a try. I have their October 2019 firmware.
 
I am of the opinion that dashcam power should be completely independent of the car battery, hence I got a cheap LiFePO4 battery from Amazon for ~$90 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/B07KPYSN3S) and from my initial testing am pleased with the results. It is rated for 166Wh which means it can go for days recording intermittent events. I have plugged my dashcam into this battery and haven't touched the cigarette port of the car at all.

The only drawback is, by not hardwiring the dashcam to the car, it doesn't get a signal to switch from regular mode to parking mode, so I have to manually toggle between the two every time. A very small price to pay for an inexpensive battery solution which has tremendous capacity to keep dashcam powered for days.

That's a shame, UK Amazon does not have that one and it doesn't come up on the link either.

Weirdly the cellink batteries are easy to hold of in the UK, but just about everything else (other LiFeP04, or large powerbanks above 25000mAh) are like gold dust here.

Sorry, I just had a google after this and it looks like they sell them on their website:


They have different ones for different regions, the UK one is this one:


It's more expensive but it looks like it ships from the UK so no customs to worry about.

The only problem is what do you do while it's charging up? Use a cheap powerbank I suppose..
 
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