topic Re: All cameras light up at once in Arlo Essential Wire-Free Cameras

All cameras light up at once

egilso — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 19:24:31 GMT

I have a mix of essential spotlight ver 1 and 2. Eight cameras in total. Battery consumption is rather high.

The last months, I have observed that all spotlights light up, even if I just want to go in and check one camera.

I would like to have the previous behaviour, where I could go in and check the feed from one camera without turning on the lights of all. The whole property lights up, and that can be disturbing..

Re: All cameras light up at once

StephenB — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 19:43:46 GMT

@egilso wrote:
The last months, I have observed that all spotlights light up, even if I just want to go in and check one camera.

Are you saying that when you livestream a camera and then toggle the spotlight on the livestream page, that all of spotlights turn on? FWIW, I am not seeing that on my system.

@egilso wrote:

Battery consumption is rather high.

How often do you need to charge them?

Re: All cameras light up at once

egilso — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 20:21:00 GMT

Hi! Yes, when I go to the app in the evening to watch the feed from one camera, I can see the other cameras wake up and light up the property in all directions. I do not have to turn on the spotlight for the others to light up.

If I do this repeatedly, eventually the other lights will turn off.

The cameras not on solar will go down from 100 to 85 pct in a week.

Re: All cameras light up at once

StephenB — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 12:51:24 GMT

@egilso wrote:

The cameras not on solar will go down from 100 to 85 pct in a week.

So about 5 weeks between charges (assuming you won't let the cameras drop below 15%).

@egilso wrote:

when I go to the app in the evening to watch the feed from one camera, I can see the other cameras wake up and light up the property in all directions. I do not have to turn on the spotlight for the others to light up.

Are the cameras recording? Just wondering if you've set them up to cross-trigger.

Re: All cameras light up at once

egilso — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 16:37:12 GMT

They are not set up to "cross trigger". Some of the cameras that activate, are set to "off" in the app, but activate anyways. They are also not included in the "arm home" mode that I use. What lights up is not floodlight, but rather IR or something that only other cameras can detect. My eye can only see two red dots on the cameras that are not supposed to be active.

Re: All cameras light up at once

Edinburgh_lad1 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:25:29 GMT

Is it to do with the latest change that every 7 hours or so, or when the user views the dashboard within that period or more, all tiles refresh, and while they refresh, they also illuminate the cameras' spotlights? This might be the explanation if all light up all at once and when the OP hasn't viewed the app for a fixed amount of time.

Personally, I don't think it was a welcome change, and if permanently implemented, there should be an option not use it. I'd rather the engineers focussed on fixing some issues and polishing the app (as it's still rough around the edges).

Re: All cameras light up at once

egilso — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:29:00 GMT

You are right! There should be an option to disable the behaviour. They also need to exclude cameras that are turned "off". I like to keep a few cameras off to take a look from time to time, saving precious battery.

Re: All cameras light up at once

StephenB — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 21:08:35 GMT

@egilso wrote:

There should be an option to disable the behaviour. They also need to exclude cameras that are turned "off".

Arlo says this new behaviour should exclude both disarmed cameras and cameras that are turned off.

I don't see much value in the behaviour itself.

Re: All cameras light up at once

Edinburgh_lad1 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 22:23:15 GMT

@StephenB It doesn't exclude disarmed cameras. Regardless of what state they're in, they all auto-refresh. My Arlo HD is never part of Arm Away or Arm Home, but always in Standby and it auto-refreshes together with the others.

@JamesC
Can we recommend that you and your team re-consider this option of auto updating tiles on Dashboard, as it doesn't seem to add much value to the system but creates some unwanted behaviours instead - see the thread above.

Re: All cameras light up at once

StephenB — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:06:28 GMT

@Edinburgh_lad1 wrote:

@StephenB It doesn't exclude disarmed cameras. Regardless of what state they're in, they all auto-refresh.

I'm going by what @BrookeN communicated (describing how it should work, but perhaps not how it does work).

I agree that if they decide to keep the feature, it needs to exclude disarmed cameras. One obvious reason is that many people are installing outdoor cameras indoors, and wanting to keep them disarmed when they are home for privacy reasons.

As far as the feature itself goes, if this were an automation that updated thumbnails, then people could edit it to exclude some or all of their cameras from update. And adjust the schedule if they wanted that.

Re: All cameras light up at once

Edinburgh_lad1 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 01:57:51 GMT

What we'll get instead is months of adjusting/fine tuning/tweaking/testing/production firmware generating and whatever else they waste their time on. That's why they're in a state they are with the app, and nothing to do with the size of their portfolio @StephenB

Re: All cameras light up at once

RegularJoe — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:21:27 GMT

I just happened upon this discussion.

I've noticed that if I happen to log in to my camera system at night.... some cameras are in view of each other and that when I turn one on to view, I can see others have their night vision infrared lights illuminating.
They stay on for what seems like less than a minute, then go out. First thing I did was check to see if any of them had recorded anything, which they hadn't.
The "spotlight" itself isn't ever lit, just the IR lights.
I've only recently noticed this phenomenon

Re: All cameras light up at once

egilso — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:30:16 GMT

Yes that is also my experience. Cameras that are not armed, and even turned off light up, and drain battery...

Re: All cameras light up at once

BrookeN — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:52:08 GMT

Can you provide if you are on Android or iOS? Can you please send me a video or screenshots of what you are seeing?

Re: All cameras light up at once

RegularJoe — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:26:58 GMT

The spotlight is lit, or just the pair of little infrared lights?

The only time I've had my spotlight actually light up without being triggered was when my home internet GB limit had been reached and their system throttled down my system speed to dial-up equivalent.... the cameras would record when triggered, but only for about 5 seconds, then the recording would stop.
I think that since the service was so erratic/slow... the camera got triggered and didn't get the signal to turn off the spotlight...
Something similar occurred one time when my home internet provider had a cable cut... service was out for 2 days and I couldn't access the system.... and the cameras weren't able to communicate with the system.... they naturally kept signaling, looking for the Arlo app from the wifi and weren't able to reach it... when I finally got service back on, all 9 of my cameras showed their batteries were drained down to around 40% level!!!!, and they are all on solar panels!!!!!
Took a day or so for every one of them to get back up to 100%

I had no way to turn off each camera manually....

Re: All cameras light up at once

BrookeN — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:21:27 GMT

Are you still seeing this same behavior?

Re: All cameras light up at once

egilso — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:27:51 GMT

Hi! I have not noticed any new behaviour. Firmware and app are stillthe same btw