Battery Drain Display Despite Charge

[albertog]

So I purchased my Essential  Wireless Spotlight Camera yesterday, charged it overnight (8hrs+), installed it today, and the app shows a red battery icon with virtually no battery power left. I reached out to support via chat and phone- they were completely useless. They asked irrelevant questions and asked me to use a charging adapter that has a 5V charging output and to charge the camera for 2-3 hrs. It took almost 60 mins for them to share this suggestion.  I followed their recommendation and charged it again, the blue light came on indicating that it's charging but the app continues not to update and still leads me to believe I have no battery life left. This is especially concerning since I'm out of town this weekend and am worried the camera will run out of battery while I'm away. I'm stuck on what to do. Again, customer service was vague and unhelpful. They were quite nice but that's not helpful when your garage's safety is compromised due to a camera that may or may not be charged. My Arlo experience is off to a terrible start. Please help community! Do I simply reset to factory settings and reinstall the camera? I logged in/out of the app and I still see a red battery. I can't believe the app doesn't even indicate whether it's charging or not.

[Retired_Member]

The app does indicate if it's charging.  When you plug in a power cable you should get a little 'lightning' symbol over the battery symbol in the app.  When fully charged the battery symbol will turn green.  When you plug out the power cable the battery symbol will turn grey and illustrate the level of battery charge remaining.

It sounds like you either have a faulty camera, a faulty charging cable, or you have the charging cable plugged into a USB port or charger which cannot provide sufficient current to charge the camera.  Given that the LED flashed blue, my guess is it's the charger current or the cable.

The official Arlo charger is rated to charge at 2 Amps - a 'rapid' charger.  The USB port on a an old laptop for example is generally rated at 0.2A - a tenth of the current of the Arlo branded charger.  Do you have an other chargers or cables available which you could try?

[albertog]

None of this worked. I solved it myself. Community: this app is awful. I had to reinstall and re-download, and set up the device again. It now shows I have a full battery. I was charging it the right way the entire time. The app is slow and customer service's suggestions don't work. My recommendation to anyone encountering this issues would be to just reinstall the entire thing and re-download it.