Smart Home Community > Tapo Smart Cameras > C403 Excessive Battery Drain
< Tapo Smart Cameras

C403 Excessive Battery Drain

C403 Excessive Battery Drain

C403 Excessive Battery Drain
C403 Excessive Battery Drain
2025-04-23 14:34:04 - last edited 2025-04-23 14:36:12
Model: Tapo C402 KIT  
Hardware Version:
Firmware Version: 1.0024

HI, I just purchased this camera and it will not stay charged for even 24 hours. The model number is actually C403 (it wouldn't allow me to select that in the drop down list) and I purchased a two pack. The other camera seems to be working a bit better, but still needs can not hold a charge longer than a day. 

 

Last night I placed the camera fully charged at around 6PM. It detected no movement and sent no notifications, however the battery was drained to 21% this morning. In this state its unusable. I've attached the battery graph. Also the graph shows 0 wake up times.

 

I have done the following to try to make the battery last longer: 

- turned the wake up sensitivity down to three

- defined the detection zone

- turned the spotlight off

 

additionally it is not facing a road or light. Could this be a defective battery? I know that this is an older camera model. 

 

Any advice is appreciated!

 

b80eb1f414b0450788fcc64c48a214a5

  0      
 
  0      
 
#1
Options
4 Reply
Re:C403 Excessive Battery Drain
2025-04-25 16:35:48
That's bizarre. I have both a C402 (white) and C403 (black), both connected to the included solar panels, and neither have dropped below 95% charge even when there is a fair amount of activity waking them up. In fact the C403 has been topped off at 100% for at least two full weeks now. The C402 sees a lot more action, so that hovers between 97-99% depending on how much sun we get. My serial #'s are Y249077X0xxxx (C402) and Y2490N6X0xxxx (C403), I'm curious if yours is in a similar range. Maybe you got a bad run of batteries with yours?
  0  
  0  
#2
Options
Re:C403 Excessive Battery Drain
2025-05-05 17:09:57

  @ChristaJ

 

4538472I figured out the culprit. The camera is actually working fine. I had linked it to my Home Assistant using the official TP Link integration. It recognized the camera immediately and while it didn't give me access to the live stream, it did expose many of the settings - battery status, privacy, motion detection, ect

 

I think what was happening is it was constantly pinging the devices for status updates and let to the battery lasting less than a day. Its a great integration otherwise; just not suitable for battery operated cameras. 

 

Happy to report that after I uninstalled the home assistant link the cameras have been behaving normally. 

 

Thanks for the input!

 

Christa 

  1  
  1  
#3
Options
Re:C403 Excessive Battery Drain
2025-07-14 14:25:27

  @ChristaJ I have one of these doing the same thing, but I dont use HA at all. I can charge it up via cable and its dead quick. Any ideas why?

  0  
  0  
#4
Options
Re:C403 Excessive Battery Drain
2025-07-29 09:43:53

  @jshg46 

 

Here are some tips might be helpful for your case, take a look. What to do if the battery drains quickly on my Tapo battery-powered camera/doorbell?

▶ Tapo P110M Matter 1.3 Release Energy Monitoring through Matter ▶ Smart HomeBase Tapo H500 - Even More Powerful Smart Hub ▶ First Smart Switch Module! Tapo S112 Smart Switch Module with Roller and Switch Dual Modes ▶ Tapo Camera Image Style & Image Brightness Try out a different image style for your camera!
  0  
  0  
#5
Options

Information

Helpful: 0

Views: 385

Replies: 4

About Us
Press
Copyright © TP-Link Systems Inc. All rights reserved.