I recently got my hands on this rebranded Dahua camera from
Amcrest. The heat issue is sort of two-part...
1) The heat radiated outward is somewhat shunted due to the plastic casing. Metal to metal conducts and dissipates heat better - think of it as a poor-man heatsink on a computer, in our case, a CCTV camera. Metal to plastic, well, not so much in that regard. So where does the heat go? To the entire metal apparatus.
2) You will need to open up the camera and remove the silica bag wedged between the camera sensor metal PCB+plating and the control board PCB. There is a HUGE silica bag below the main PCB - which is well more than enough to consume all the humidity. Removing the small bag wedged between the two PCB's greatly reduced the heat contained within the camera internals. It now idles at 103 to 104F. It also concerned me that there's a Thermal Pad on the metal plating from the top inside the camera plate, which fits next to the bottom of the internal casing. This was effectively telling me this device does get rather warm. Prior to the removal of the smaller silica bag wedged between the two segments, I was seeing temperatures anywhere between 115 to 135F! This is not an ideal temperature for a CCTV camera, especially if it were to be mounted outdoors, and even more so if it was in direct/partial sunlight for a portion of the day. That temperature would skyrocket, and well - would likely spell the end for the camera.
Added what I am seeing from UniFi's POE switch port for this unit...
- Lit area, no IR active:
- Voltage: 53 – 53.25 Volts
- Current: 46 – 54 mA
- Wattage: 2.4 – 3.3 Watts
- Non-lit area, IR cut, and IR LEDs on @100%:
- Voltage: 53.10 Volts
- Current: 64 – 67 mA
- Wattage: 2.5 – 4 Watts
The values ranged and were always lightly-dynamic. Oddly enough, voltage with IR on resulted in very stable voltage values.
