Solar vs Battery Setting

I have 2 cams (a 2 and a 2C) hard-wired to a common AC charger, which is plugged into an outside junction box. The power to the box can be turned on and off with a switch inside the house. As such, I can control the charging either of two ways:

  1. Leave the inside switch off most of the time, and only turn it on when I need to recharge either or both of the cams, then turn it back off, or
  2. Leave the switch on all the time, with both cams being continuously charged.
    In the first case (intermittent charging), I would assume the correct setting for “Power Source” would be “Battery”.
    My question is, in the second case (continuous charging), should the Power Source be set to “Battery” or “Solar”?

They’ve now removed the option to select battery or solar on there new stock.

For me… I would go with the switch. If I didn’t have that option I would go with solar. Found out a wired battery doorbell will “maintain” the charging of the installed battery. If this is true I would assume it would deal with solar the same way. Just an uninformed guess.

I would opt for the switch option. That way, you can monitor the amount of charge and keep from overcharging. Switching the power source to solar, if you don’t have the Eufy solar panel, won’t do anything to prevent overcharging. It will keep trying to charge the batteries to 100%, which will severely cut down the number of cycles you can get out of the batteries.

For a test, I tried hooking a charger to one of my 2C cams and setting its power source to solar. It always jammed as much charge as possible into the batteries and didn’t do any cycling. However, my battery doorbell, when wired to a transformer, cycles back and forth between about 70 -85% and it doesn’t have a power source selection available.

I am gradually running cat 5 wire to all my camera locations so I can have more options available. For now, I have 2 Eufy battery cams running on 5 volt POE adapters that run back to a POE switch. If the cameras need charging, I power up the POE and monitor the charge. Saves climbing a ladder, but it would be nice if Eufy would provide us with a better automatic option to cycle power to battery cams when they have continuous power.