Hi @KernelPad. There could be a few different causes for why the Stick Up Camera’s battery is draining more quickly. First, approximately how many events is it recording each day? You can check this by going to the Event History log. The Solar Panels are designed to provide a trickle charge to your Ring device as long as they’re receiving at least 4-6 hours of direct sunlight per day. This means the battery can still drain more quickly than it is being charged if the Solar Panel isn’t receiving enough sunlight or if your Ring is recording a large number of events each day. If your Ring is recording a lot of events, you can try adjusting the Motion Frequency settings or decreasing the motion sensitivity from within the Motion Zones.
Another troubleshooting step you may want to try is to disconnect the Solar Panel from the Stick Up Cam and then perform a reset and new setup. To reset the Camera, you’ll want to hold down the setup button for at least 20 seconds. Once that’s done, you’ll need to set the Camera back up again in the Ring App by following the steps under Set Up a Device. You can then reconnect the Solar Panel. I hope this helps.
Go to your stickup cam’s settings. Select “Device Settings”. Then select “General Settings”.
Look at “Power Mode”. It should indicate “Battery” mode. If it says “Wired” (or anything else), you should change it to “Battery” mode by tapping on “Power Mode” and tap “Switch to Battery Mode” at the bottom of the screen.
Having it set up in Wired Mode will drain your battery quicker because that mode has more extended/usable features. When you get it setup in Battery mode, I would suggest setting your video recording length no more than 30 seconds. Play around with motion detection sensitivity as well as Motion Verification to suit your environment. You may want to keep Motion Verification turned off if you don’t want video recording to end/stop prematurely. Also, you can play with Motion Frequency settings between “Frequent” and “Standard” to suit your needs. As far as Motion Schedule, I set up a daytime schedule to turn off motion detection because I’m home all day for the most part.
Keep in mind also that camera angle plays a big part for unwanted detections such as if you get too many by motion farther away than you want. (mine was picking up motion all the way across my cul de sac untill I aimed the cam downward more). Setting up “Privacy Zones” (only 2 can be set) I find to not be very effective in reducing motion detections.
And lastly, from my testing with and without the solar panel, the panel simply doesn’t work with the gen. 3 stickup cams…at least, not now. My cam battery will discharge about 1% every 24-48 hrs. with or without the panel. The panel has NEVER charged the cam battery even 1% on blazingly hot, sunny Texas days even with motion detection disabled for long periods. I sent my panel back to Amazon for a refund. I believe this to be not so much a problem with the panel itself but more with a firmware problem in the camera as a lot of stickup battery cam owners (as well as spotlight battery cam owners) weren’t experiencing this charging problem until after a few months ago from what I gather by reading comments. Leads me to believe a change in the firmware hosed the charging ability somehow.
But for now, my battery is holding a charge reasonably well (discharging slowly) with the way I have all my settings applied. Hope all this was helpful.
It’s a firmware issue. I’ve had extensive experience with this problem. I bought a 3-pack of Stickup Battery Cams from Costco. I purchased 3 third-Party solar panels (Wasserstein) from Amazon. When I first installed them the solar panels were actually giving me about 10% charge in just a few hours and maintaining 100% battery charge for the rest of the day. After about a month I noticed my cameras were depleting the usual amount overnight and when the sun came up they would show that they were charging but the battery wouldn’t go up even one percent with 8 hours of DIRECT sunlight. I couldn’t understand what was happening but I thought maybe it was the third-Party panels malfunctioning, so I bought a RING solar panel and that didn’t fix the problem. I called RING and they sent me out 3 replacement cameras. I hooked them up and the same thing was happening. After numerous calls the techs determined that I wasn’t the only one having this issue and that it was infact a firmware issue. The last tech I spoke with (Tylor) was awesome and said that the only thing he could do at the moment would be to send me 3 2nd Gen cameras because they have no issues with solar. So I got my 3 replacement 2nd Gen cameras and they’ve worked GREAT with the solar. I like the 3rd Gen cameras better and will swap these out once they fix whatever the bug is. Sorry it’s so long winded but I hope this helps.
Snapshot capture feature seemed to drain my battery the last two days after installing a solar panel to my already installed stick up cam.
Before the solar attachment I only had to charge my battery once a month or two depending on driveway activity.
Then after attaching solar my battery charged 10% in 2 hrs the get to 76% before it got dark and then died at 2am.
I am not sure if going thru process of switching from battery to wire changed/enabled a setting like snapshot but I didn’t have the problem before.
It seems like it saves constant video on ring which chews thru the battery
Hi Hench. Snapshot Capture shouldn’t drain that much. I have mine set to a frequency of “every minute” and have no issues keeping my batteries above 90% at all times. However, switching over to “wired mode” after connecting the panel will 100% drain your battery super fast (especially overnight). Wired mode is really for “plug-in models” and you don’t have to switch to wired when it asks you. I would recommend you switching back to battery mode and still using snapshot capture as it’s a great feature to see what’s going on in between motion detections. My original post was about a very specific issue with the panels not charging at all which was determined to be a technical glitch in the 3rd generation cameras. Hope this helps you.
