A doorbell camera's battery is drained by how often it wakes, not by how long it is on

Battery capacity is the number every doorbell camera is sold on, and it is the number that explains the least about how long the product actually lasts between charges. A 5000 mAh cell sounds like it should give you a predictable number of weeks, and then the first month in a busy doorway gives you half of what you expected. Nothing is faulty. The capacity was never the variable that mattered. The camera is asleep almost all the time A battery doorbell spends the overwhelming majority of its life in a low-power state where the imaging path is off and only a motion sensor is listening. It is not recording, it is not streaming, and it is not holding a full Wi-Fi session. This is the only reason a battery doorbell is possible at all. A camera sensor plus an encoder plus a Wi-Fi radio running continuously would drain any reasonably sized cell in hours, not weeks. The entire product category rests on the assumption that interesting moments are rare. Which means the interesting