Welcome to the forum thumbsup.
Sorry to hear about your parking woes.
The normal way to power a dashcam for parking guard is using a hard wire kit, this will have a build in low voltage cutoff so you do not run your car battery down and ruin it ( they are not made for deep discharge )
That give you access to a range of parking guard modes, my personal favorite is low bitrate that always record even sound, but at a lower bitrate so the heat generated internally are less, and also the smaller files mean less memory used on the SD card.
Memory space today is however not that big of a challenge as you can get huge memory cards for a reasonable price, today a 512 GB card cost less than i have paid for 64GB cards back in the day.
There are other parkig guard modes, motion detect rarely work good CUZ it is most often way too sensitive so with just a little " action " around the camera will record more or less all the time, and this full fledged footage so higher heat generated, which of course with my meager knowledge of American geography is not the biggest problem in Colorado and for damn sure not with the approaching season.
Since hit and run seem to be your problem it sound like you are parked curbside, so you cant really use the modern super low power use modes CUZ the camera are deep asleep but will wake up after a few seconds, but if some punk just sideswipe you and tear off i recon he will be long gone for that to be a viable option.
So you are probably going to have to use one of the more " thirsty " modes.
Another issue also more and more frequent in our climate, dew or rain droplets on the glass, well that will render your footage more or less unusable, there are of course various nano this and that treatments that will help with this to some degree.
Later in the year, snow and / or frost, and you are out of luck im afraid. even if a parking guard running camera will defrost a little of the windscreen if you have frost on it, but not so much it can get a peek out.
After all of that choosing a parking guard mode, and knowing the challenges out there.
for instance right now at 2 AM here in Denmark, all my dashcam see is this.
The CCTV camera on my 2 floor balcony door see a bit more. ( less than optimal phone screen capture the raw footage is better on both dashcam and CCTV cameras )
with the optical zoom 1440p camera i will get a identifying shot if someone get frisky with my car, not really worried of vehicular hits where i park or out and about parking while shopping.
Anyway back to business, running parking guard all evening / night, well you have to drive a bit the next day to replenish that on what ever power source you will be using.
Car battery.
Dedicated dashcam power pack.
Or s USB power bank, these can be used CUZ most systems with some minutes of no G-sensor action, they will revert to parking guard.
Using several power banks you can of course replace and recharge at home as you go, but the LIpo batteries are bot super good with very low temperatures or for that matter very high ones, and as you probably know they can be a firehazard.
So getting power, of some sort, also not just a /me snap finger solution.
Personally as i have the CCTV camera at home, i only use parking guard on a timer ideally, but ATM the 2 systems i test do not have a timer option, so ATM i use the G-sensor for trigger and it do not go off too often CUZ i dont really drive that much on average maybe like 15 -20 min daily, far from enough to put the change back you have used the rest of the day parked.
Also a problem / challenge you Americans have is the plates, often cars will just have one, and they are terrible small not like the EU plates that more tailored towards reading them.
A 1080p camera of years ago will capture plates alright while parked curbside on 60 km/h / 37 MPH street, but that will only happen in the daytime low light is a whole hornet nest of problems, even if the newer systems are sort of able do do that at speed.
The sensors to look for these days are Sony Starvis 2 IMX675 for 1440p sensors and IMX678 for 4K ones. These are the cream of the crop sensors ATM, but there are also systems that do not have the HDR and tricks deploied correctly so even with the right hardware a plate capture is still not a for sure thing with a dashcam.
Install should not take more than 1 hour for a installer.
