Massive battery drain for new stick up cam

I've just installed a stick up cam to watch for cars and people in our driveway. Any useful angle has to include the busy road outside our house. I can easily exclude it from alerts with motion zones, but I'm getting unexpected battery drain. If I keep motion frequency at default the battery looks set to last 3 weeks, which isn't great but can be managed. But I'm losing almost all of the motion events happening within the zone. If I put motion frequency at frequently I capture events perfectly, but the battery lasts less than 24 hours. Wifi signal is good, but I can see in my network monitoring that if the cam is set to frequent it is permanently uploading at 1-2 Mbps. If set to default there are long pauses between spikes of upload. What I think is happening is that motion zone exclusion is processing in cloud not on device, and so the permanent activity on the road means the cam is either permanently uploading for the cloud to decide whether to alert me, or near permanently on cooldown between motion events happening in the excluded zone. Neither works for me. Is there another explanation? Does the stick up cam even have the ability to exclude an area on device? It's definitely set to battery mode, so it shouldn't be following the wired setup protocol. I've attempted to factory reset it, but no matter how long I hold the reset button it only enters system setup mode.