How To Extend Your Nest Doorbell’s Battery Life

By Mark King On Jul 14, 2022

The ideal way to add a video doorbell to your home, is using existing wiring. Because you can install it and never worry about it again. But the Nest Doorbell Battery does have a battery inside, so you don’t need to mess with wires. But you do need to charge the battery. So how can you extend the battery on the Nest Doorbell Battery so that it lasts longer? That’s exactly what we’re going to show you today.

The Nest Doorbell battery does already last quite a while on a single charge, but it’s always nice to have it last just a bit longer, in case you forgot to charge it.

What’s the expected battery life of the Nest Doorbell?

Google estimates that the Nest Doorbell battery life is going to last you about a month. Or up to 6 months if you live in a quiet area. Of course, the Nest Doorbell Battery will record when it sees events, and not 24/7. So whether you live on a busy road or a quiet one, can have a big impact on your battery life.

In my experience, I live in a somewhat “typical” neighborhood, which Google estimates as to lasting about two and a half months. And so far that’s about what it has lasted for me. But it could always last a bit longer. So let’s talk about how to extend that battery life.

How to extend Nest Doorbell battery life

The easiest way to extend your battery life is to lower the battery usage. This will optimize the video quality, shorten the length of time for which events are recorded, and take longer to begin recording between events. Here’s how you can do that:

Open the Google Home app.
Touch and hold your device’s tile.
Tap on Settings
Tap on Battery
Tap on Battery Usage, and then More Battery life.

The next way would be to use the battery saver. When the automatic battery saver option is enabled, it will automatically adjust its features to help conserve battery. Here’s how you can turn it on.

Open the Google Home app.
Touch and hold your device’s tile.
Tap on Settings
Tap on Battery
Tap the switch next to Automatic battery saver.

Those two options should help you squeak out a bit more battery life out of your Nest Doorbell. Of course, you may not want to do either of those things, since it might miss things, so here are a few more things you can do.

Change the video quality

Google lets you change the video quality, which can help save battery life to.

To do this, do the following:

Open the Google Home app.
Touch and hold your device’s tile.
Tap on Settings.
Then tap on Video
Now, find video quality, and tap on “high”.

This will allow it to reduce the quality, while still keeping it high quality.

Adjust how much activity your camera records

Another option would be to adjust how much activity your camera can record. You can do things like turn off seen events, use activity zones and tweak your camera’s angle. Here’s how to use each one.

Turn off seen events is a good way to conserve battery power, as you don’t need it recording every time you walk out of your front door, or someone walks by on the sidewalk in front of your home. To do this:

Open the Google Home app.
Touch and hold your device’s tile.
Tap on Settings.
Tap on Events.
Select Seen Events.
Tap the switch next to any events that you want to disable.

Next up, activity zones. Nest allows you to use Activity Zones, to reduce the amount of notifications you get. You can use the app to draw an Activity Zone around some of your camera’s view. Then you can select the event notifications that you want to receive for that zone.

Finally, tweak the angle of your doorbell. Nest does include a angle mount that you can use to adjust this angle. A good idea here is to adjust the angle, so that it doesn’t pick up the street. So that you aren’t getting a lot of unwanted activity that’s not needed. This may not be possible for everyone, but it’s a good idea.

And there you have it. That’s how you can adjust and extend your Nest Doorbell battery life.