Tapo C402 battery draining issues with no explanation
Hello everyone
I would like to say first that I love this smart camera; everything included.
The main issue with this device I bought (Tapo Camera C402 battery powered with a solar panel kit) is its battery drain.
I cannot explain anymore what is going wrong. I have tried a variety of actions:
- Switching the camera's place
- Putting it at a lower height (~2.7m)
- Changing its camera angle. Preventing any direct street/house light exposure.
- Leveling the camera's motion sensor.
- Reducing the wake up sensitivity.
- Reducing the motion/person detection sensitivity.
- Putting it into privacy mode the time in which I am doing stuff within the camera's vision (by the way, it kept draining way too much battery regardless! Even when additionally deactivating all detection)
- Deactivating detection on moments that people/myself are moving/doing stuff within the camera's field of vision.
- Cleaning the solar panel/changing its angle. Positioning it accordingly to the Southern Hemisphere standards (pointing North with a 30 to 45 degrees angle)
Nothing works.
After draining from 100% to ~80% in two days -> the battery starts draining exaggeratedly. It gets to a ridiculous amount of ~23% drain per day. The solar panel tries to keep up, but obviously, at the best it can get up to 15% battery charge. It is still a negative number i.e. the battery still drains altogether!
I am posting below some pics to track one day's performance. You can see the number of wake up times, the activity time, how much battery it drained as well as how much the solar panel charged it.
1. Wake up times & solar panel output:
2. Time of use / activity time:
3. Battery drain
all these three pictures are comparing the same day i.e. Jul 11, 2025.
It is my opinion that the battery is faulty i.e. a battery that has been too long kept in storage and it just drained its chemical efficiency.
I would like to be granted either one of the following options:
- Receive another camera
- Receive a new battery so that I can switch it.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Hello Wayne! Thank you very much for reaching out to me
I have set the camera to privacy mode (a whole day) on the 16/07/2025 (July 16th) in addition to deactivating all activity detection
These were the results
As you can see, there were no detection time nor activity
Here are some pictures of how my camera is set up (taken on the following day):
As it can be (not very detailed) seen the anti leak protection is inserted into the charging port.
In addition to that, the solar panel is also connected to the wire extender using the weather proof connection
I have made sure that, the panel that connects to the extension, and then the extension that connects to the camera, both have correctly set their seal black rings as well
By the way, no third party software is being used. Just the Tapo android application with a Tapo Care subscription
My modem-router is company provided. It is a NOKIA G-1425G-B