Will camera battery act as power back-up

[2labs]

If someone was to unplug the camera from it’s ac outlet, will the battery act as a back-up. If so, will the recording be interrupted when it switches from ac power to the battery.

[melnok]

This is an interesting question, gave it a try on my new setup. The answer seems to be yes - battery will act as uninterrupted backup to losing AC power.

In my test first had a camera in AC power, then walked away out of its view, enabled Armed mode, and then walked to the camera to disable it from USB power, then walked backwards while being in camera view all the time.

The camera picked up my motion, and did report it to my phone before disabling AC power, so recording had started before plugging off power. Looking back at the footage in my phone, I do not see any interruption to the footage while I cut off power, but the video is an uninterrupted stream of me walking to the camera and away.

There were however two flukes I encountered in this test:

1. I have disabled the "Status Light" indicator of the camera. I did not have the blue status led light up, but 1-2 seconds after I unplugged the camera, the blue status led did start blinking briefly on the camera, even though it was supposed to be disabled. When new motion was detected in the camera while in battery power, blue led did not light up. So it seems that once there is a AC power->battery transition, the blue led light will briefly blink an indication, even if "Status Light" is set to OFF. (This is probably a minor issue - the camera is likely already noticed if one is plugging off its power)

2. I had difficulties opening the Library tab in my Arlo app briefly after conducting this test. I do not know if this is related to the AC->battery test sequence or what was the cause, but for some reason the Library tab did not want to load for almost a minute after the test, but I had to close the app once or twice. Not sure what that was about (network slowdown?)

Tested in following setup:

Arlo Pro 2 base station

Firmware 1.12.0.0_27099

Hardware VMB4000r3

Camera 1
Firmware 1.125.11.3_26229
Hardware H4

Camera 2
Firmware 1.125.11.3_26229
Hardware H3

Arlo App

Version 2.6.3_23200

Released 11/26/18

Huawei P10 Plus

Android 8.0.0

[2labs]

Wow, thank you melnok.  That was certainly a quick and very thorough reply.  I am glad to hear that the camera continues to record with no interruptions when going from ac to battery.  That gives good peace of mind in the event someone thinks they can just unplug or cut the power cable.   Thank you very much.