Help with solar camera

[QDM4fun]

Put out a 2015 covert code black one week ago and the battery is dead. I am using a 12v SLA battery with the biggest panel Karl sells at ultramatic. This is connected using a covert cable to the cam. Inside the cam are 10 energizer rechargeable AA's.

I tested this set up before taking it to lease and it seemed to work fine. Anybody having similar issues? My 2013 models ran forever on this setup.

[afishinman14]

I have a similar setup. But I don't put batteries inside the camera. External power only. Don't know if there's anything to that, but I just didn't want to chance it not working because I was supplying two power sources

[QDM4fun]

The covert has to have internal batteries to power the cam while you close the door. I purposely put AA's that were so dead they would only run the cam for the few seconds it took me close the door and plug the battery back in to insure it was running on the big battery. After testing the cam for a couple of weeks the AA's were showing half charge.

One thing I did different was set the cam to send to two emails. That may be zapping it faster. I've got build another one this week and I may try a bigger panel and a external solar controller

[afishinman14]

This is how we set ours up

[Samson]

You need to check the amps that your panel is putting out. I had similar problems with my setup. My panel was putting out 20 volts + but as soon as any load was put on the battery the panel voltage would drop to 6V. The amperage was only .1 amps so it really wasn't charging anything when hooked up to a battery. It turned out there was a bad solder joint on the panel. Fixed that and it started charging just fine. I would also look into getting a charge controller that cuts off the charging from the panel when the battery is full, as overcharging can kill your batteries.