Arlo Go 2 Solar LTE Solar Panel is not charging fast enough

[LouFaulx]

I bought an Arlo Go 2 LTE camera March 22nd through T-Mobile and bought an Arlo Go 2 Solar Panel Model VMA5600-20000S and the Solar Panel did not work at all, so I contacted Arlo and received a replacement Solar Panel Model VMA5600-20000S and I had the camera fully charged when installing the original Solar Panel and the Replacement Solar panel. Both the original Solar Panel and the replacement Solar Panel did not keep my Arlo Go 2 camera charged. Could it be possible that Arlo is sent me a replacement Solar Panel that does not work with my Arlo Go 2 LTE camera? I need help keeping the camera charged. I use it outside and their is no way that I can charge it without a Solar Panel.  Please help or I will have to return the Arlo Go 2 LTE Camera and the Solar Panel. Could Arlo email me a phone number where I could talk to an expert Arlo technician?

Lou

[jguerdat]

1) How many total minutes per day are you recording and live viewing? <5 minutes per day, on average, is how battery life is spec'ed. If you have Smart Notifications enabled, disable them temporarily since the servers may be discarding videos you have deemed irrelevant.

2) Signal strength can cause battery depletion if the camera has issues trying to maintain the connection to the Internet. You may need to move the camera to a location that gets a better signal.

3) You can contact support by going to Settings, Support Center and select your camera. Various options will be presented there.

[StephenB]

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@LouFaulx wrote:

I bought an Arlo Go 2 LTE camera March 22nd through T-Mobile and bought an Arlo Go 2 Solar Panel Model VMA5600-20000S ... Could it be possible that Arlo is sent me a replacement Solar Panel that does not work with my Arlo Go 2 LTE camera? 

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The VMA5600 is compatible with the camera.

In addition to @jguerdat's questions, I'd like to know if the camera is ever showing the charging icons on the app.

• https://kb.arlo.com/000045870/How-to-troubleshoot-Arlo-Solar-Panel-charging-issues

Also, when you are charging it, are you removing the battery and putting it in an external charger?  Or charging it with a USB charger and the magnetic cable?

[jonam_indus]

The link you provided is a good high level checklist. If the problem cannot be resolved after going through the link, here are a few more notes that will help you "manage" your battery charging.

I was able to somewhat resolve a similar issue with my battery losing power rapidly and solar charging not really kicking in. Following are the remedies I have used, which I tested step by step to see if they do make a difference.

Symptom

When I arrived on the site of my camera, I realized that there is bright sunlight, and everything seemed like the perfect condition for the solar panel to charge the battery. But the icon was showing as not charging. And the battery charge was falling rapidly. (About 1% every 15 minutes). In a few days I would have lost all charge.

Remedies

The first thing I tried seemed to help instantly. I simply restarted the camera using the Restart link. This I could have done remotely and without having to drive to the site. But I did not think that, that would make a difference, so I had not tried it. As soon as I restarted the camera, I saw that the sun icon for solar charging lit up. It took about 30 minutes, and I saw the battery charge went up by 1%. Considering the sun was already setting down, I considered this the first turn around in battery charge. Not sure if the icon display was failing or the battery was actually not getting charged. Hard to tell as there is no other way to verify.

Next I checked the solar magnetic cable and removed it and reconnected it. To my surprise I saw a spider trapped in there which escaped. I do not know if the spider was trapped in there or simply crawling outside. But I suspect that would have made a big difference if that was it.

I also thought that the cell coverage for the last 48 hours was not very good. Meaning the nearby TMobile tower was acting up. In fact my iphone which uses Verizon wasn't responding well either. That remote location does have an issue with LTE and the signal is often weak. I scanned a few notes on this forum and realized that the camera may be trying to repeatedly contact LTE and attempt to retransmit and reconnect as the LTE signal was weak. This might be placing an unusual load on the battery. Not sure why that would crash the icon display functionality. But this is a significant contributing factor towards battery performance.

I also noticed when the LTE signal was strong, there were a lot of alerts coming through which again could drain the battery. For each alert, there was a video stream being generated and the video was being transmitted. I had to tune my alerts significantly. I played with the rules but also changed the Standby instead of Arm Away. As I noticed that Arm Away was super sensitive. If there is even a slight breeze, it was generating an alert.

I had to disable video generation altogether and simply get the alerts. Leaving me to visit the camera live and check out what was up if I had got an alert. So all my video traffic came to a standstill further easing the battery load.

I tried tuning the Motion to send me alerts only for People motion, but seems like there is no way to do this. And I continued getting the alerts even though there was other type of motion. It would be great for example if there is a way generate a video only for People motion and not vehicle motion. 

I disabled emails altogether as I noticed that could be taxing on the camera battery.

I also thought about using a Schedule to Arm Away at certain times of day. But I really have put it on Standby for now so that I can get the battery back to 100% somehow.

[StephenB]

Some of your suggestions have no effect on battery life, so I thought I would clarify.

The camera streams whenever the passive infrared (PIR) sensor triggers.  The streamed video is sent to the Arlo cloud, which then 

1. determines if the motion is in or out of zone
2. supresses recordings and notifications for out-of-zone recordings
3. otherwise saves the recording in the cloud library
4. classifes the objects in the recording (person, animal, etc)
5. sends a notification when the smart notification has that type of classification enabled.

So activity zones, email notifications, etc have absolutely no effect on battery life.  Neither would supression of recordings based on the object classification.  All that is done in the cloud, and the camera acts precisely the same way no matter how you adjust those settings.

What matters for power use is

1. the amount of streaming the camera does
2. the amount the spotlight is turned on
3. the quality of the network connection (recovering from connection drops can use quite a bit of power).

Adjusting the motion threshold in the camera rules, and adjusting the camera field of view to reduce unwanted motion are the best strategies in most cases.