Why does the battery drain in camera?

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Yno

Yno

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Is my camera (R5 Mark II) secretly accessing the web? Has it been recruited to help SETI? Does it serve a useful purpose?

I'm inclined to take it out when not using the camera. I'm hoping this won't erase any settings.
 
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My R5 used to do this and it turned out that I had left the WiFi and Bluetooth enabled. It's basically sitting there waiting to receive a signal from another device. There is an option in menu to turn it off. I believe it is under the wrench/settings menu, and labelled Wifi/Bluetooth settings (or similar). Try turning that off and see what happens. You may also want to disable GPS. Alternatively, you absolutely can remove your battery without losing your settings, but the battery drain will begin as soon as you re-insert the battery.

Also, lithium-ion batteries do slowly self-discharge if left sitting for months at a time, but you really shouldn't lose more than a few percentage points over the course of a week.
 
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Thanks!

I disabled Bluetooth and GPS. There is no "WiFi" specific setting, but I disabled network connections.

I will see what happens in a week or so.
 
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Understandable, but this camera seems to drain them to 10% in a few weeks. Hopefully, the changes I made will alleviate the issue.
 
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First, it makes sense to remove batteries from valuable personal devices when they're not being used for long periods of time. Why? In the small chance that the battery leaks which can involve either a very time consuming or expensive cleanup or losing the device.

Second, batteries degrade over time, even when not used. You can put in a fully charged battery but if it sits long enough, it will lose power. That's why it's useful to go check the batteries in your emergency flashlights. Or why a car parked for 5 months without running (even with a new battery) may not be able to start when you get in it.

Third, cold weather doesn't drain batteries. But it does weaken the connections (thus making it look like the battery is "dead.") So if you left a flashlight or camera in the glovebox of a car overnight in winter for a couple of days, the batteries would register as "dead" if you then tried to use them in cold weather.
 
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Jack Dawe said:
A battery will drain slowly, just sitting there doing nothing. I don't know why, but it's what batteries do.
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But if a battery is drained to the point that it doesn't work anymore, if you turn it off, and leave it off for a bit, it will recover a small amount. When I have a wheelchair or scooter or even a car which is battery powered and it slows to a stop, if I wait for a bit, I can turn it back on and it will have recovered a small amount of juice. I know this because Bob made an electric car out of an old Escort. One day he had to get home by driving a short way and then waiting for the batteries to recover. This works for things like batteries in a remote too.

If you want to take the battery out of your car for the winter because you are going to be gone, you need to leave it on trickle charge. We leave our boat when it is up out of water in the marina, we have solar panels that keep a small charge coming in.

As far as camera batteries go, I have had a camera which ate batteries - it seemed like just turning it on and waiting until it was 'awake' discharged the batteries. AA batteries seemed to go faster than dedicated batteries. If I was not going to be using a camera for a long time, I would take the batteries out. Not just because they would slowly discharged,ge but because when they got discharged they might harm the camera. It's a whole lot easier to get new batteries than to fix a camera.
 
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Yno said:
Thanks!

I disabled Bluetooth and GPS. There is no "WiFi" specific setting, but I disabled network connections.

I will see what happens in a week or so.
Click to expand...
An easy, one step solution to turn it all of is to set airplane mode to 'on'.
In the past there were people with battery drain problems with specific lenses(Tamron?).
 
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I remember that when I first got this camera, I had it set up to be able to send pictures immediately to my phone or tablet so that I could see them a bit larger. It was a novel idea at first, but I lost interest. I guess I never turned the WIFI and Bluetooth off.
 
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