F770 draining my battery OR do I have a bad battery?

[J0shM1lls]

Hey guys, looking for a bit of advice before I take the car in to get the battery checked. I just took delivery not too long ago of my 2016 Ford Focus RS, and installed my thinkware F770 last week.

Yesterday I noticed when I got in the car in the morning and started it up, on the information screen it says "Hill Start Assist not available" and the camera did not come out of parking mode. After driving for maybe five to ten minutes, I hear the chime indicating that the camera is powering on, and then at the same time that message disappears from the information cluster. Driving the car through the day after that it was fine so I thought it was a fluke.

Today, I get in and the same thing happens. I checked the video and I'm not sure how accurate it is, but when I exit the car at night the battery is listed at 12.5v, in the morning as I'm getting in its at 12.1-12.2v. Is it possible that the camera is what is draining the battery and causing these error messages or is that voltage already low to begin with when exiting the car?

Thanks for any input!

 

[Sir Loin]

try disabling parking mode. If the battery problem goes away, then it is your camera. If you still have battery problem with parking mode disabled, then it is something else on your car.

 

[J0shM1lls]

try disabling parking mode. If the battery problem goes away, then it is your camera. If you still have battery problem with parking mode disabled, then it is something else on your car.

Yeah, I'm going to just unplug the camera tonight and see what happens tomorrow morning. Thanks.

 

[Wytwolf]

Civic throws error messages similar to that when the batter gets low (left he radio one too long while parked), but I have my F750 set at 12.0 cut off and never had an issue with the dash cam draining the battery too low. Sadly Honda only use's small batteries (not much bitter then those hot wheels toy jeeps of kids) and my voltage only reads about 12.3 after driving for about an hour or 2. Battery is coming upon 3 years so I might look into upgrading it.

 

[Dippy]

Josh, in the fairly safe assumption that your 2016 RS has stop/start then the voltage range you have seen seems as expected. Although I struggled to find hard data, my research revealed that the batteries used for cars with stop/start are designed to cope with deep discharge, rapid charge (from energy recuperation systems) and being mostly in a state of partial discharge. The downside of this is that they are not so good for dashcams in parking mode. My own car (2015 Audi S5) has a battery voltage of around 12.5V to 12.6V when I have used it for a decent amount of time, however usually I don't so it is mostly at around 12.3V to 12.4V. I have my F750 set to shut off at 12.1V and I'd say my parking mode lasts between 18 and 36 hours depending on what level of charge it starts at.

In your case I am slightly surprised that you see a drop from 12.5V to 12.1V in the space of 12 hours or less. Do you know the Ah capacity of your battery? However unless the power connection on the F770 is drastically different from the F750, which I don't think so, I have to think that there is something strange happening with your car. The only way that the dashcam should stay in parking mode is if the switched power had not been applied. Even if it was only 12.1V it should change to continuous. The fact that the car reported that HSA was not enabled suggests that there was an internal issue with the power management. Surely your alternator would have been kicking out at least 13V. I don't know much about the power management systems on modern cars but it is maybe possible that yours sensed that the dashcam had drained the battery to a threshold level whereby it decided that it should cut power to some circuits until the battery was sufficiently charged, and this was 5-10 minutes into your journey. If this was the case then you must have the switched wire connected to the fuse of such a circuit?

 

[J0shM1lls]

Josh, in the fairly safe assumption that your 2016 RS has stop/start then the voltage range you have seen seems as expected. Although I struggled to find hard data, my research revealed that the batteries used for cars with stop/start are designed to cope with deep discharge, rapid charge (from energy recuperation systems) and being mostly in a state of partial discharge. The downside of this is that they are not so good for dashcams in parking mode. My own car (2015 Audi S5) has a battery voltage of around 12.5V to 12.6V when I have used it for a decent amount of time, however usually I don't so it is mostly at around 12.3V to 12.4V. I have my F750 set to shut off at 12.1V and I'd say my parking mode lasts between 18 and 36 hours depending on what level of charge it starts at.

In your case I am slightly surprised that you see a drop from 12.5V to 12.1V in the space of 12 hours or less. Do you know the Ah capacity of your battery? However unless the power connection on the F770 is drastically different from the F750, which I don't think so, I have to think that there is something strange happening with your car. The only way that the dashcam should stay in parking mode is if the switched power had not been applied. Even if it was only 12.1V it should change to continuous. The fact that the car reported that HSA was not enabled suggests that there was an internal issue with the power management. Surely your alternator would have been kicking out at least 13V. I don't know much about the power management systems on modern cars but it is maybe possible that yours sensed that the dashcam had drained the battery to a threshold level whereby it decided that it should cut power to some circuits until the battery was sufficiently charged, and this was 5-10 minutes into your journey. If this was the case then you must have the switched wire connected to the fuse of such a circuit?

Thanks for the reply Dippy! Yes, it does indeed have stop/start so to hear that the voltage is normal is positive. I unplugged the camera last night when I got home, tested the voltage at 12.56V, tested it again this morning and it was at 12.37V. The owner's manual lists the battery model as bagm-48h6-760 which from what I can tell is 760CCA with a reserve (ah?) of 120.

One of the items listed as being protected by the circuit I used for the switched portion of the dash cam was "Voltage Quality Monitor", so your comment about needing to be charged up first was most likely spot on.

There may also be a lingering issue in one of my car's modules, so I'm thinking about pulling the negative battery terminal tonight in hopes of that fixing the issue.

 

[Dippy]

No. The reserve capacity of a battery is how many minutes it will last (at a 'useful voltage') with a 25A current draw. I can't find the Ah rating for yours. However I was only asking as a comparison to mine to see how the dashcam parking durations relate. Mine has a cold crank of over 900A so as a rough rule of thumb it ought to have a higher capacity. Whilst my car might have a higher quiescent draw than yours, the different shouldn't be significant. So I'd say your parking mode would likely last no longer than mine does and probably less, on average.

I'm in two minds about your situation. Whilst I could suggest that you try another fuse to avoid this problem, I also think that maybe if your car's power management system is doing what I think it is, maybe you should let it, since that might preserve battery life? Then you could adjust the dashcam parking mode shutoff voltage to avoid it happening. If you need parking mode to last longer then I think the proper solution is to install an auxiliary battery (I think a popular one is called the Cellink-B or similar).

Out of interest how is the parking mode controlled on the F770? On the F750 I can set a voltage between about 11.8V and 12.3V (IIRC), but there is also a timer which can be set to maximum 48 hours. Is this the same on the F770?

 

[J0shM1lls]

No. The reserve capacity of a battery is how many minutes it will last (at a 'useful voltage') with a 25A current draw. I can't find the Ah rating for yours. However I was only asking as a comparison to mine to see how the dashcam parking durations relate. Mine has a cold crank of over 900A so as a rough rule of thumb it ought to have a higher capacity. Whilst my car might have a higher quiescent draw than yours, the different shouldn't be significant. So I'd say your parking mode would likely last no longer than mine does and probably less, on average.

I'm in two minds about your situation. Whilst I could suggest that you try another fuse to avoid this problem, I also think that maybe if your car's power management system is doing what I think it is, maybe you should let it, since that might preserve battery life? Then you could adjust the dashcam parking mode shutoff voltage to avoid it happening. If you need parking mode to last longer then I think the proper solution is to install an auxiliary battery (I think a popular one is called the Cellink-B or similar).

Out of interest how is the parking mode controlled on the F770? On the F750 I can set a voltage between about 11.8V and 12.3V (IIRC), but there is also a timer which can be set to maximum 48 hours. Is this the same on the F770?

Cellink-B and adjusting parking voltage are all good suggestions. Yes, it has the same voltage and time settings as the F750. I think for good measure, I'm going to completely remove any traces of the dash cam and take it in to my local dealer to have them test the battery just to be sure. Thanks for all your help thus far - hopefully I can get this resolved soon!

 

[J0shM1lls]

Ok boys and girls... So if you've ever seen the HBO series "Game of Thrones" you must know this guy...

HODOR

Well, the lesson to learn here today is, like HODOR, some people don't know their own strength... If you're pushing and PUSHING on a fuse and it doesn't go in and then it suddenly does - you might wanna pull it out and double check.

I FKING HODOR'd this fuse tap...

So I've removed it, put everything back to stock and my hope is that tomorrow morning when I wake up to get in my car - there'll be no more error messages on the display...


HODOR

 

[BlackboxMyCar]

Hmm my Fiesta ST has the hill start assist as well but I've never come across that error message and my cutoff voltage is at 11.8V
Even one time where I didn't drive the car for a while and it had to be jump started, I didn't get any error messages on the dash.
Definitely possible that the FiST and FoRS are set up differently especially with Sync 3 and AWD

In theory the hardwired dashcam should cause the battery to wear down faster but interestingly enough I haven't seen any reduction in performance over the 2 years I've had a dashcam in the Fiesta (since April 2014)
Back then I was running a FineVu CR500HD on 12.0V cutoff but even now with my F770 on 11.6V I still get over 12 hours of recording.
I think Ford puts a pretty beefy battery in the Fiestas because in contrast our brand new Prius C runs for less than 6 hours in parking mode

 

[J0shM1lls]

Hmm my Fiesta ST has the hill start assist as well but I've never come across that error message and my cutoff voltage is at 11.8V
Even one time where I didn't drive the car for a while and it had to be jump started, I didn't get any error messages on the dash.
Definitely possible that the FiST and FoRS are set up differently especially with Sync 3 and AWD

In theory the hardwired dashcam should cause the battery to wear down faster but interestingly enough I haven't seen any reduction in performance over the 2 years I've had a dashcam in the Fiesta (since April 2014)
Back then I was running a FineVu CR500HD on 12.0V cutoff but even now with my F770 on 11.6V I still get over 12 hours of recording.
I think Ford puts a pretty beefy battery in the Fiestas because in contrast our brand new Prius C runs for less than 6 hours in parking mode

If you look one post up, you'll find that I'm an idiot!
The fuse that I tapping into was a rather important fuse that I think hasn't been getting power for a few days as I bent the crap out of the fuse tap and it wasn't seated properly. Now that I've put the stock fuse back in place and I know that circuit is powered back up, my hopes are that tomorrow will bring an error free display! I'm holding my breath!

 

[Dippy]

So you think that you had an intermittent connection on that fuse?

 

[J0shM1lls]

So you think that you had an intermittent connection on that fuse?

Yep, the hot side was the one seated properly so the dash cam was getting power, but the other fuse wasn't completing the circuit...

I'm pleased to report that I, HODOR, was indeed the cause of the Hill Start assist not working on startup... The fuse that I tapped (kind of), controlled the "Voltage Quality Monitor" (among other things) which is responsible for maintaining voltage to the radio and other accessories while the engine is cranking during a stop/start event (its a DC/DC converter). Apparently if the circuit isn't complete on startup it'll throw the "Hill Start Assist not available" message until the car is warmed up enough for auto stop/start to begin functioning. It then enables that circuit which was then turning on my dash cam and disabling the stupid error message.

TLDR; it was my fault for not seating the fuse right, I'm HODOR.

 

[thancam]

Yep, the hot side was the one seated properly so the dash cam was getting power, but the other fuse wasn't completing the circuit...

I'm pleased to report that I, HODOR, was indeed the cause of the Hill Start assist not working on startup... The fuse that I tapped (kind of), controlled the "Voltage Quality Monitor" (among other things) which is responsible for maintaining voltage to the radio and other accessories while the engine is cranking during a stop/start event (its a DC/DC converter). Apparently if the circuit isn't complete on startup it'll throw the "Hill Start Assist not available" message until the car is warmed up enough for auto stop/start to begin functioning. It then enables that circuit which was then turning on my dash cam and disabling the stupid error message.

TLDR; it was my fault for not seating the fuse right, I'm HODOR.

what door are you holding ?