Pro 4 stopped holding a charge

[dc51stState]

My pro4 held a charge for a couple months at a time for about a year and a half.  Then battery life cut to a week or two before getting the 15% power email warning.  After a few cycles of that, I bought another battery (SKU: VMA5400-10000S), but the problem persists.  What would cause this sudden degradation in battery life?

[StephenB]

How much video streaming is the camera doing (minutes per day)?  If you have activity zones enabled, the remove for a couple of days to estimate this.

[dc51stState]

Looks like a lot of video.  I'll try reducing the sensitivity, but it still doesn't explain why the behavior changed.

[StephenB]

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@dc51stState wrote:

I'll try reducing the sensitivity, but it still doesn't explain why the behavior changed.

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Time of year can affect on how often the cameras trigger.

[dc51stState]

I deleted the activity zone I had defined prior to the last charge, and the drain was still very quick - just a few days.

[dc51stState]

The battery use seemed pretty steady for around 16 months and then things took a sharp turn for the worse some time last fall.

[StephenB]

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@dc51stState wrote:

I deleted the activity zone I had defined prior to the last charge, and the drain was still very quick - just a few days.

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Activity zones don't affect battery life at all.  

However, disabling them is useful when troubleshooting power drain, because the arlo cloud supresses recordings that are out-of-zone.

Can you tell us about how many minutes of video the camera was streaming per day w/o the zones?

Also, if you have multiple Pro 4 cameras, you can try swapping with another one, and then see if the problem moves with the camera, or stays with the location.

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@dc51stState wrote:

The battery use seemed pretty steady for around 16 months and then things took a sharp turn for the worse some time last fall.

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So likely not seasonal, since it's been that way for a while.

Potential causes here include

1. lots of video streaming
2. poor signal quality (resulting in the camera reconnecting to wifi all the time)
3. battery degradation
4. camera hardware failure
5. occasionally a firmware bug that affects power management.

(1) is the most common (and if it were a firmware bug, we'd be seeing a lot more posts on this).

[dc51stState]

Just deleted the zones so no data yet.  We have a flag nearby that I mask out with the zones - does the cropping out the zones occur on the camera or in the cloud.   Will activity outside the activity zone still drain the battery?

Firmware says no update available.  I don't think it is the battery since the new one seems to have similar life.  Hopefully reducing sensitivity will help.

I picked 5 random days and totaled the 10 second segments.  Looks like an average of about 21 minutes of video captured, ranging from 7 minutes to around 40 per day,

[StephenB · Accepted solution]

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@dc51stState wrote:

Just deleted the zones so no data yet.  We have a flag nearby that I mask out with the zones - does the cropping out the zones occur on the camera or in the cloud.   Will activity outside the activity zone still drain the battery?

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All motion detected by the camera results in video being streamed to the Arlo cloud.  It doesn't matter whether the motion is inside the zone or outside.

The Arlo cloud then applies the activity zones.  If motion is outside the zone, the recording and notification are supressed.

If your camera is triggering on your flag waving, the battery will drain quickly - and activity zones will not fix that.  The best solution is to lower the camera so that the flag is not in the field of view.  You can also try reducing the motion threshold - but if you lower it too much, the camera will miss detections that you want to get.

[dc51stState]

Thank you.  Reducing the sensitivity and aiming so the flags trigger motion less often seems to be helping with battery drain.