What can I do if/when essential series battery capacity is no longer enough for me due to age/use?

[SkyBlue99]

I have recently purchased a number of Arlo essential spotlight wire free cameras. I have noticed that the batteries are non-removable. Batteries chemically age over time and lose capacity. If/when they no longer hold enough power per charge for me, what can I do? Do I throw the cameras away?

[StephenB · Accepted solution]

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@SkyBlue99 wrote:
I have recently purchased a number of Arlo essential spotlight wire free cameras. I have noticed that the batteries are non-removable. Batteries chemically age over time and lose capacity. If/when they no longer hold enough power per charge for me, what can I do? Do I throw the cameras away?

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Unfortunately the batteries aren't user-replacable - so you would need to discard them.

Assuming 300 charge cycles, then if you recharge them about once a month, you'd end up with a 25 year battery life.  Not sure you'd actually see that (as battery aging would also come into play), but it does suggest that the cameras might well fail before the batteries do.

FWIW, you don't want to let the batteries fully discharge, it's best to recharge them when they reach around 20%.

[SkyBlue99]

Thank you! The first week that I’ve had them, two of them went down to 30%. Because they are new, me, my sister and my brother-in-law have been doing a lot of fiddling with them and tuning settings So I bet they’ve gotten more use this first week then they will going forward. We are trying to catch someone who has been egging their house. They on a busy corner and my brother-in-law wants to catch activity in the street too in case the culprit throws the eggs from the street, so the cameras do get a quite a bit of action too though.

[StephenB]

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@SkyBlue99 wrote:
They on a busy corner and my brother-in-law wants to catch activity in the street too in case the culprit throws the eggs from the street, so the cameras do get a quite a bit of action too though.

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That will of course drain the batteries a lot faster. 

After you resolve the egger problem, you can adjust the field of view so it doesn't capture the street - which will improve the battery life.  Though I've found that headlight glare will still sometimes trigger the cameras at night.

BTW, activity zones (and smart notifications) won't improve the battery life.  The recordings are still made and streamed to the cloud.  Then the cloud decides what recordings to keep.

[SkyBlue99]

Good to know about needing to zoom in or adjust the field of view to help conserve battery life. Thank you!