I have never had decent battery life with these cameras. I bought 3 at the same time, but have yet to install the third because of the battery life. The longest I have ever gotten was 2 weeks before having to remove, recharge and replace. Luckily mine are installed in a somewhat easily reachable location. Neither are pointed at high activity areas. One is pointed straight down at my front door, and the other is on my back porch. I have set them both to the absolute bare minimum of settings that are allowed in the settings, lowest notifications, shortest recordings, no cloud usage, no images or video for the notifications that I can’t disable, IR lights off, etc… After fully charging the batteries for the front door…that sees very little traffic…they lasted 2.5 days. I will go buy some replacement batteries and see if anything changes. I think something is going on with the networking in the firmware of all of the cameras though, as my internet usage as skyrocketed lately and the batteries are dying very quickly. I have noticed that the wired cameras I have record almost constantly even with motion sensitivity set to low, which is fine as they record to the SD cards. The wireless cameras also have SD cards and they record very rarely, even when set to the 6 seconds, yet the batteries just drain regardless…And I have no option to disable smart detection.
I have the same problem, my batteries last for max 2-3 weeks which is far less than the 6 months mentioned in the commercial. I have 5 outdoor wire free cameras all with the same problem. The only explanation i gave to the problem is if the cameras that were further away from the router have difficulty at connecting therefore the battery is consumed. I added extra internet points at my house but the problem remains the same.
Hi, I purchased mine in December 2020, charged the batteries and sighted the camera on 11 December. Today 25 January 21, the batteries are flat and need charging. Certainly not anything like the battery life that I was expecting.
Hello. How is your camera working other than battery usage? Do you get a lot of alerts from it?
Hey @StuH The battery power is directly related to the number of alerts & notifications turned on.
Go to your settings, smart detection and manage your alerts to see if this will have an impact on battery life.
In short, the lower the alert frequency, the longer your batteries will last. If your constantly getting alerts, the battery will drain much faster.
I have the kami wire-free Outdoor camera.(June 2021 - 4 units)
the site boasts of 4 months battery life, but my front door camera just lasted around 9-10 days before it went to the charger again. I had security = ‘medium’ and I understand there were many alerts rec’d …but then I was thinking then at least 1 month(25 % of the site mentioned advert) …but I guess I have to change my expectation to 9-10 days max. now.
Charging on the mains takes a good 4 hours …so there is this downtime too. I have ordered 1 set of extra backup batteries just to negate this downtime.
Just wanted to share my experience with the ‘kami’ batteries here.
With settings at minimums I am luck to get a couple days on mine.
A friend who is an electrical engineer tested the batteries and said they are no way near what they claim to be rated. He said this is typical.
I tossed the camera in he junk closet since it is pretty much useless.
sad that it had to end like this.
what other alternative have you then jumped over to ? (if I may ask)
Sounds like your batteries were defective. We would have been happy to send you a replacement set. We are sorry to hear you decided to throw the camera away.
Let us know if there is anything we can do to help improve your overall experience with Kami Home & Yi Tech
The batteries weren’t defective. They are just cheap Chinese batteries that are not labeled correctly which is very common. The batteries test at about 600mAh and NOT 2600 like on the label. This is quite a common scam when ordering 18650 batteries from China.
Cheap batteries and seconds are relabeled with a high mAh rating than the battery really has.
We even found on some batteries you could peel the label to reveal the original label.
this is really some hard info. I have placed an order at amazon, who are shipping these batteries from china …and it says 5800 mah on the label…Brrrrr
Hey @wirlybird if you can show me a battery not made in Asia (China or Japan), ill be shocked. And, can you send me a screen shot of the meter showing that the battery tested at 600mAh? We have never come a across a battery like that in our own internal testing. Can you send me an image of the battery without the plastic cover removed?
Many thanks for your assistance
Plenty of electric cars 
Europe, Australia, USA. Indeed my electric car battery is American made 
So does ANYONE have a place to get replacement batteries for the Outdoor Yi cameras? They sell the cameras but leave customers hanging where to find replacement batteries that they don’t sell. If battery life is typically 6 months why not tell us where to get them. Anyone know where to find them?
I need batteries as well - none listed on EBay
TERRIBLE BATTERY LIFE!!!
False advertising.