Blink has made dramatic improvements in application features and hardware since their first generation. The current Blink generations such as the Blink Outdoor and Blink Outdoor 4 have stated battery life of up to two-years. However, depending upon usage and even battery brand, you may not be achieving this. We’re going to discuss how to increase battery life on a Blink Camera.
Control the Motion
A significant amount of motion recording is the top consumer of batteries. Placing your camera where there’s a lot of action will trigger communication between the Blink camera and sync module hence sucking out more battery life. There are several ways to influence this behavior.
Strongly consider using activity zones. Activity zones will help eliminate false motion alerts. Select the areas where valid motion will likely appear and deselect the places where invalid motion might be encountered. Useful applications of activity zones can exclude things like leaves on a tree from creating motion alerts. You can also use these to exclude the lower half of a room where a pet might be triggering alerts.
Blink cameras also permit influencing the motion sensitivity. The lower the sensitivity number, the less motion events will occur.
Lastly, schedule your retrigger interval smartly. This setting is in seconds and tells Blink how much time to elapse prior to the next motion alert. Using a low setting is almost akin to continuous recording. This is a sure way to reduce your battery life. Think about using at least 20 seconds to increase the battery life on a Blink Camera.
Not Using Motion Detection?
If motion detection is of no use, turn it off. This is s sure way to increase battery life on a Blink Camera.
This be done on an individual camera from the app. Simply go into settings and toggle the Enable button to the left. That will turn motion detection off for that camera.
You can also turn it off at the Sync Module. Simple press disarm near the bottom of the camera summary. This will turn off motion for all cameras attached to this Sync Module.
Use Good Batteries
Brands make a difference so does battery type. Select a high quality lithium battery. Never use alkaline batteries in these cameras. Lithium batteries have a long shelf life so buy these in large quantities to save some cash. Those in need of AA batteries can consider the Energizer AA Lithium Batteries. From our experience, these are the longest lasting batteries for this camera line.
Unknown brands are best to avoid. While it’s potentially less money than the big brands, our experience has been poor and they wind up costing more than the brand names since they will not last as long. Don’t skimp on the battery quality.
Summary
As you can see, the most effective say to increase battery life on a Blink Camera is through the motion settings. By using motion settings that minimize unnecessary detection, you can achieve the 2-year stated battery life on your Blink cameras.