Original base stations locking up & draining camera batteries (about 12 hours) within 1-2 month.

[Prolixium]

Hi - 

I've 3x original (VMB3000) base stations with a collection of mostly Pro 2 and some Pro (original) cameras connected.

All the base stations have always been a little flaky and lock up every few months and need to be rebooted.  Since this has happened when I've been away from home I connected Z-Wave power switches to each so I could remotely reboot them when they lock up (whey this happens the "reboot" option in the app doesn't work since the base station is unresponsive).  I also have setup some ping monitoring so I am alerted when they drop off the network.

Lately (1-2 months), they seem to be locking up in a different way, which is a bit more troublesome.  They stay alive on the network (responding to ping) but disconnect from all cameras.  Other than the lack of motion notifications the only way I can tell that the base station is locked up is that the status is not updated for the cameras in the "devices" tab of the app.  The app does not give me an error message in front of the image preview but instead the battery/motion icons never populate.  What's worse is that when this happens the batteries in the Pro 2 (only Pro 2) connected cameras drain dead after a few hours if I don't become aware of this and power cycle the base station.  For example, recently I didn't notice this all day (~12 hours) and batteries in all the Pro 2 cameras, that I just replaced a week ago, were completely dead.  It seems that when the base stations lock up in this fashion the cameras stay awake (spinlock?) and this drains the battery.

I'm guessing a recent firmware update caused the base stations to be unstable and lock up in this new way recently.  Since they are quite old I'm considering just wholesale replacing them with one of the newer models, but - before I do that, I'd like to check if anyone else has seen this same type of issue and also find out if the newer base stations are /actually/ more stable than the old ones.

Can anyone comment about stability of the newer (VMB3000, VMB5000, etc.) base stations?  i.e. do they crash/lock-up and need periodic reboots like the VMB3000s that I have?

Thanks for reading!

- Mark

(added this to the Pro 2 forum since it was the only one mostly appropriate)

[jguerdat]

I've never had an issue with my VMB3010 in all the years it's been in use. That, of course, is a sample of one so not statistically valid. Since all of your bases seem to have the same problem, I would look for common issues, such as power outages, however brief, as well as 2.4GHz interference. We know from past experience that a power glitch can cause issues with these bases (I'm not so sure about later versions) with the base becoming ready before the router. That's why I suggest a UPS for your modem, router and base(s) to prevent them from going down in the first place.

The interference possibility seems less likely since that wouldn't cause the bases to become unresponsive but could address the battery issue with the idea being that pooor connections to the bases could be draining the batteries.

[Prolixium]

Thanks for the reply.  At least I know that some of the other base station models can be stable 🙂

The entirety of my home network infra. is backed up by UPSes (several, in fact), including the base stations.  They're the APC UPS Pro models, so they're not the more industrial type that have the inverter circuitry always-on.  That being said, no power failures or blips that have caused the UPSes to flip on battery correlate with the base stations misbehaving.

There is a /lot/ of 2.4 GHz congestion in my area, to the point where for my home Wi-Fi I only use 5 GHz.  As you said, it seems unlikely that this would cause the base stations to lock up but I suppose it could be a factor that could contribute to battery drain when the base station is unresponsive.

Anyway, since these things are pretty old I think I'm going to start replacing them one by one, starting with the unit that seems to lock up much more regularly than the others.  Hopefully this will help things!

- Mark