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Doorbell basically non-functional - sometimes get 'Your Doorbell is out of sync' message

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pbarham
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I have been having lots of problems with my Arlo Doorbell ... and in fact I have not been able yet to successfully 'answer the door'.  This is very frustrating and painful to debug, and is really not making my wife very impressed!

 

The doorbell appears to be installed (it upgraded its firmare), paired with the base station and the Arlo Pro camera above the door.  the motion sensor works, and the ring lights up when somebody approaches the door.

 

When you press the button, things get very much less impressive.  

At least 10 seconds later I get an 'incoming call' on one of my Apple devices... depends which one last got lucky with the Arlo app perhsaps?

 

If the call arrives on my iPhone, I can answer it but I get no audio (the 'speaker' button appears to be selected).  There is another button for 'video'  ... when I press that I get taken to the Arlo app which wants me to sign in using touch ID.  Sometimes that works, other times I go through that procedure about 3 times.

 

Often when I get logged in, there is a red exclamation point in a circle next to the 'Doorbell' device on the app main screen.  If I click on that it tells me 'Doorbell is out of sync.  Please resync the doorbell with the base station'.

 

Sometimes the doorbell isn't 'out of sync', and about 10 seconds after I log into the Arlo app I get a still image of my front door - but still no audio.  

 

I have tried clicking on the 'send a message' buttons, but no audio comes out of the doorbell.

 

This is really a very poor experience so far.   Does anybody have any suggestions on how to make this device work as intended?  

 

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jguerdat
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Guru

The incoming call relies on the phone being awake. If the phone hasn't been used recently, it's asleep and the call can't come through. You can try disabling battery optimizations to see if that helps.

 

Check your doorbell settings - the default is for the mic to be muted. You can change that so it's unmuted by default. If you don't want to change it, just click on the mic icon to activate it.

JamesC
Community Manager
Community Manager

pbarham,

 

Adding to the suggests by jguerdat, it sounds like some of these issues may be related to the 'out of sync' message you sometimes are seeing. How far from the base station is the doorbell? It sounds like the distance or obstructions could be causing the doorbell to struggle maintaining it's connection with the base.

 

JamesC

pbarham
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The doorbell and camera are about 10 feet from the Arlo base station, and about 20ft from my WiFi access point.  It's not clear to me which they communicate with (since I don't see any SSID configuration in the base station settings?)

 

When I answer a call from the doorbell on my iPhone, I can never hear any audio from the doorbell on the phone.  With the phone unmuted, I can sometimes make audio come out of the doorbell (with several seconds lag).  Frequently the call gets dropped after around 10 seconds.

 

Are there no diagnostics I can look at to work out what exactly Arlo thinks is going on?  This seems extremely random to me - every call behaves in a slightly different way.  😞      

pbarham
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I spent 45 minutes this morning on 'Live Chat' support -- until it became clear that the person I was talking to knew approximately nothing about this product.  (initially claimed that it needed an 'Arlo Chime' for audio to work at all... then that audio wasn't supposed to come to your phone, then started cut&pasting marketing blurb from the netgear website, etc.)

 

I gave up and phoned the support telephone line, and talked to Jesse who seemed to know what he was talking about.  

 

He asked me whether I had set the switch inside to doorbell to 'position 3' - since I didn't have a chime (digital or analog). 

I said that, no I had not, since the printed manual only mentions positions 1 and 2, and the installation process in the app doesn't even mention the switch unless you try to 'add a chime'. 

 

Anyhow ... it turns out that if I

  • remove the doorbell from the base station
  • set the internal switch fo position 3,
  • do a factory reset (hold the sync button for 10 seconds until the LED ring starts to flash), and then
  • re-add the doorbell to my base station via the app.

....THEN ... audio from the doorbell starts working, bidirectionally. 

And when I send a 'message', it comes out of the speaker on the doorbell! 

 

The lag is still terrible (about 1 second in each direction), and the incoming call delay from when the doorbell is pressed is borderline unacceptable (20-30 seconds).... BUT at least I now have audio!!!    

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