VMC4040P - Camera battery charger prong broken and corroded and won't charge

[TimandJules]

Hello Arlo Community,

I'm pretty frustrated and looking for help.  Last July 4th, 2020 night, someone got the brilliant idea to deliberately catch our heavy recycle bin on fire with a bunch of fireworks.  This was in our back alley which we can't see unless we go out back.  Luckily, one of our neighbors was sitting outside and saw the flames and was able to put it out before it caught our garage on fire.  After that, we knew we had to get and put up cameras around the back and front of the house.  We did a lot of research and determined that Arlo was the choice for us as they had great reviews, were weatherproof and our local Costco carried them.  We loved Arlo and have recommended many people to their system including my sister and other friends. 

We went to Costco and purchased a 3 pack of Arlo Pro 3 cameras.  They were easy to charge and set up and we're fantastic in letting us see what was going on anywhere we were as long as we had access to the internet.  We even used one of the cameras to talk to our little doggy when we were travelling.  Unfortunately, a little over 2 and a half month in, one of the cameras stopped working and when I took it down and pulled out the battery it had gotten moisture in it.  A few days later, a second camera went out.  Thankfully, Costco has a 90 day return policy and so we figured this was a bad batch of cameras and so we took them back to Costco and got a new 3 pack.  Same thing, set them up and put them in place.  They worked great and we actually got to the point that we didn't even check them regularly.  Today, I noticed one of the cameras wasn't charging, the one watching our back alley.  I took the camera down and went to charge it and it wouldn't show it charging on the app.  I took the battery apart and noticed it had corroded on the inside charging connection and cleaned it and tried it again.  I noticed one of the 3 inside charging prongs had broken and fallen back into the camera housing.    We checked our warranty and realized it expired on 9-29-2021.  Unfortunately, we are outside of our warranty window.  We would love to just get and put up another Arlo camera but based on our experience, I'm hard pressed to do that as I don't want to invest more money into another Arlo only to have this one or one of our other two to fail again.   I've been researching other camera systems to replace our existing Arlo setup but wanted to reach out first. 

My question to the Arlo community is has anyone else experienced this, and, if so, figured out a solution to fix it? 

Thanks,

Tim and Juliana

[TomMac]

Can't fix camera, but will advise that on all the Arlo cameras that users be real careful with the seal area...

to the point of using a small amount of silicon grease on the o-rings/seal area