topic Re: Battery consumption when no internet in Arlo Pro 4

Battery consumption when no internet

hbjeppesen — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 23:09:39 GMT

I have three Arlo Pro 4 running directly on wifi, so no base and all three cameras are running on battery.

Wifi is from Ubiquiti DreamMachine and 1Gbit fiber internet.

Works very well and so far (4 months) I've been very satisfied with battery time.
But in the area, the fiber rollout is still ongoing and this causes a few short and longer disconnects now and then.

Today a fiber main cable to the area was cut, leaving the area without fiber for 12-15 hours.

I know my network in the house was working, as I can see that in the Dream Machine logs.

Only one camera has come online again and it's down to 36% battery. All three was 80+% this weekend.

This is the second time I've seen this behavior, where battery is either fully or almost drained, just because the internet connection is lost for a prolonged period.

All three cameras are running latest firmware.

This must be a bug in the camera firmware?

Re: Battery consumption when no internet

StephenB — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 11:43:09 GMT

@hbjeppesen wrote:

Today a fiber main cable to the area was cut, leaving the area without fiber for 12-15 hours.

I know my network in the house was working, as I can see that in the Dream Machine logs.

Only one camera has come online again and it's down to 36% battery. All three was 80+% this weekend.

This is the second time I've seen this behavior, where battery is either fully or almost drained, just because the internet connection is lost for a prolonged period.

This must be a bug in the camera firmware?

It would certainly be unexpected if the Pro 4s are connected to a base station.

I don't know what happens in this use case if the cameras are directly connected to your home network. It's possible that they are trying to communicate with the Arlo back-end and those failed attempts are draining power. @Mark-V or @JamesC might be able to give more info on expected behavior.

I agree it's undesirable, and it would be good to have the cameras shift to a more power-efficient mode when the internet (or base station connection) is lost. The consequence would be that re-connecting when the connections are restored would take longer.

Re: Battery consumption when no internet

TomMac — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 13:37:27 GMT

I believe it's responding just like a camera to a base unit... the camera keep "pinging" to find the connection.

An option that MAY work as it does with the base units is to use a UPS on the router ( to maintain wifi )... even with the main internet gone, the wifi signal will remain and the camera will believe it connected

Re: Battery consumption when no internet

hbjeppesen — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 13:55:15 GMT

It's not an wifi or power issue, its the lack of internet connection out of the house, causing the issue.

Wifi was running just fine all along 😉

The fiber cable to the entire area (small place) was cut and it took the telco 12-15 hours to get someone on site and splice it all up again. So the cameras have wifi connectivity, but not internet connectivity.

If this causes them to use 70-80% of the battery in 12 hours, there is something wrong in the (lack of) handling of disconnected network.

Another camera has gone from more than 80% power to 6%, during the 12-15 hours of not having internet.

I really expect this to be handled differently. I normally get maybe 3-5 "hits" per week from the cameras (animals etc), so I doubt this was the reason, while they were offline.

And it's the second time I've seen this, so the firmware must be handling the offline state incorrectly on wifi.