Cold-testing cameras...

[GFM]

Temp here has been down to -39, all my Dahua cameras have been working fine exposed to the cold. Did have one Foscam require a re-boot after the really cold temp in an unheated shed, but it is working again now too. (The other foscams are indoors)
Just curious is any one has had colder temps and cameras worked or didn't work?
Wonder if these cameras were cold-tested in the design/testing phases?

 

[Cameraguy]

Temp here has been down to -39, all my Dahua cameras have been working fine exposed to the cold. Did have one Foscam require a re-boot after the really cold temp in an unheated shed, but it is working again now too. (The other foscams are indoors)
Just curious is any one has had colder temps and cameras worked or didn't work?
Wonder if these cameras were cold-tested in the design/testing phases?

Have an old Sunba ptz 805 that required a reboot but back up after that.
All Dahua cameras are running strong

 

[opus too]

You have me beat by a few degrees. In Minnesota we hit -31F and my HDW2231 never burped either. I was almost surprised.

 

[Camit]

-20 here with a windchill of -55 all my dahua starlights worked fine as well as my hikviosion no problems

 

[bigredfish]

And to think we nearly froze our asses off when it hit 39

 

[looney2ns]

And to think we nearly froze our asses off when it hit 39

 

[Cameraguy]

Needless to say northern folk have a lil more GRIT

 

[J Sigmo]

Many years ago, back in the '70s, my brother and a friend drove from Wyoming to California to go scuba diving around Catalena Island. As they drove through LA, they wore the scuba gear so they could breathe that good old Wyoming air rather than the brown stuff.

But what amazed them was that when they got to the beach, where the temperature was in the 50s, they saw folks wearing down coats! They were in their bathing suits, enjoying the warmth, and the locals looked at them as if they were nuts!

I was in Hawaii one time, and they had a hurricane. All of the locals were sheltering indoors, but we didn't want to waste valuable vacation time in paradise, so we were out gathering up palm fronds and playing. The wind was not as bad at the height of the storm as what we had left behind, and it was in the 70s for temperature, rather than the 20s.

I will say, though, that the wind did do a lot of damage! If things were built that way where I live, they'd be scrubbed off of the landscape the first winter!

 

[Whoaru99]

I expect there is some cold testing, and you'll probably find the rated operating range in the specs.

More than likely they will operate outside the specs but with no performance/functional guarantee. Generally speaking, the mfg. will not state any extremes beyond the published specs because that creates implied performance that any given unit may or may not achieve, and expectations of the customer that any given unit may not be able to fulfill.

 

[J Sigmo]

Also, remember that the camera will keep itself somewhat warmer than the ambient temperature due to it's own power consumption. A few watts dissipated in a small device can make a big difference.

Where I worked some years ago, we built a large environmental chamber where we temperature cycled our completed telemetry units as well as subassemblies. We ran things up to +140 and down to -40 for 24 hours each. We had as many failures cold as we did hot.

A friend who was an IC test engineer for HP at the time said that was impossible because heat was the real enemy. But what we found, when opening cold-failed ICs, was that it was almost always failures of the lead-bonds. The little wires that are ultrasonically bonded to the lead frame and the dice themselves.

The cold caused mechanical stress due to dissimilar metals having different thermal shrinkage, and any poor "welds" would separate where the tiny wires were supposed to be mated to either the IC Die, or the lead frame.

Often, these failures were intermittent and temperature-dependent. And that is a real pain to troubleshoot in the field.

Equipment that had successfully passed our temperature cycling was amazingly reliable in the field. While it took extra time and labor to do this, it saved us many times that in customer dissatisfaction and our costs to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to troubleshoot and repair the equipment in the field.