topic Solar panel charging question in Arlo Pro 2

Solar panel charging question

Urbnor — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 18:03:41 GMT

Ok, maybe the subject-line is a bit confusing but anyway:

Last evening I installed (in complete darkness) a solarpanel on one of my cameras. At the time the battery was at 17 % in the camera. Now, 14 hours later the sun is shining and the "charge"-symbol (the small lightning) is active but the battery is reading 0 %. Is this correct? Should the battery not be giving the actual charging percentage, even if the solarpanel is charging?

/Urban.

Re: solarpanel charging?

TomMac — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 13:09:07 GMT

It should be showing a percent even while charging....

I would check to insure the cable is plugged into the panel ( and camera ) correctly and seated.

Re: solarpanel charging?

Urbnor — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 08:07:08 GMT

TomMac was right 🙂 . I did get the solarpanel to work and it is (was) charging the camera. I had to take down the camera and charge it with the regular charger first. I charged it to about 85% and then put it on the wall and connected the solarpanel. The sun was shing and the solarpanel managed to charged the camera up to 91% befor the sun set and it got dark.

However(!), there is something basically very "strange" with the whole concept. The next morning (like 8 hours later) the battery was down to about 70% again. Why does the camera use more electricity when connected to the panel? I have infact tested (a year ago) connecting another camera (I have four Arlo pro 2 cameras) to a big 15000 mAh powerbank and the same behaviour occured. In two days the powerbank was empty, very strange?!?!?

Any ideas to why the cameras use a lot more electricity when plugged in to a solarpanel or a powerbank?

/Urban.

Re: solarpanel charging?

jguerdat — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 13:49:22 GMT

A faulty panel could cause battery drain but first determine how many minutes of recording and live view time occurred overnight. You may need to remove zones to accomplish this properly.

As for the powerbank issue, the camera runs off the external power when connected, especially if it's only a 5v output (battery charging needs 9v) . Since the camera sees the external power, it runs all the time, just as if you had used AC power.

Re: solarpanel charging?

Urbnor — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 14:01:08 GMT

There was no recording at all done during the night. But the panel did charge the camera from 85-91% during two hours of direct sunlight so I recon the panel works as it should.

Well, I`ll just keep runing the cameras on battery alone. I work just fine like that. It was merely a test if a solarpanel would stop me having to worry about charging every now end then.