Arlo Pro 4 XL battery drains fast

[amir_ghan]

Hi everyone,

I just purchased the Arlo Pro 4 XL from Costco, and connected the 3 cameras to the SmartHub. I charged all of them fully before installing. 2 of the cameras lost only 1% battery in the last 3 days, but one of them lost almost 30% (10% per day!). This is an XL model which supposed to have bigger batteries for almost a year of charge.

I already checked the signal strength/video bandwidth and it's strong (green), and the firmware is up-to-date. My WiFi router is not in between the SmartHub and the camera (as I saw some discussions about that). I even turned off all of the motion alerts except for People, so this camera might detect something 2-3 times in a day.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

[StephenB]

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@amir_ghan wrote:

I even turned off all of the motion alerts except for People, so this camera might detect something 2-3 times in a day.

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That doesn't improve power use - it just supresses some notifications.

The two main factors in power use are

1. WiFi - if the camera is dropping connections, it will use a lot of power trying to reconnect.
2. Video streaming - the more video streamed (either livestreaming or recording), the faster the battery will drain.

Note if you have activity zones set up, you can't tell how much video per day is being streamed.  The activity zones are processed in the Arlo Cloud, and recordings outside the zones are supressed.  

The most effective ways I know of to reduce power use are to

1. position the camera to keep as much unwanted motion as possible outside the field of view
2. reduce the motion sensitivity
3. make sure the camera has good wifi signal strength