Arlo Pro - review after 4 weeks

[ron-bali]

I received the Arlo Pro with two cameras on December 30, so now after just over 4 weeks I give some impressions.

Installation - fairly easy but I had to try several locations for the cameras and for the base-station.

Camera location – of course you want a clear view of intruders, but you also need to position it so that the infra-red sensor will detect the motion of the intruder.  The sensor needs to be fairly close to the action so some of my early tries were getting good camera views but were failing to detect motion.

Base Station Location – once you have an idea of where the cameras will be you can consider base-station locations that will give the cameras reasonable wireless signals.  The base station requires power and an Ethernet cable.  Since I use powerline adapters it is easy to get an Ethernet cable near any power outlet. The other factor is the siren – who needs to hear it?  I ended up choosing a location at one corner of the house, high up near the roof.

Arming and disarming.  You have choices:

1. Schedule by clock times. Presumably OK for business locations.
2. Manually turn on and off – this is like old style burglar alarms except now you use the app on your smartphone to turn it to armed or disarmed
3. Geofencing – the term used for tracking via smartphone(s). A circular zone is drawn around your home, and then if your phone is on and the Arlo app is running, the base station is informed if the phone is in the zone (so disarm), or out of the zone (so arm).  This can work for multiple phones so we arm when all the phones are out, and disarm when any phone is in.  There will be complications to this approach if you mislay your phone or let its battery go empty.  I believe the phone app has to be running and it starts up when the phone starts so that’s OK but you should resist the temptation to close all running apps.

Battery life. It depends how much of the time you have the camera recording. If your schedule or geofencing is so good that the system is only armed when there is no motion in the house, then the camera hardly ever comes on and the battery lasts for months.  But if you have it recording many times per day perhaps because of animals or delivery people or passers by, then the battery may only last 2 or 3 weeks.

Network outages – it is worth attaching a USB disk (I have a 500 GB disk) so that the video recordings are kept even if the Internet connection is down.

Power outages – I have thought about this but not implemented anything.  A small capacity uninterrupted power supply could keep the base station going through a blackout, but your household network would be down and so no Internet connection.  The next step would be a bigger UPS to keep your home network alive, and you would need to avoid using powerline adapters for the network connection to the base station.

Conclusion.  I am impressed and mostly happy.
Pros: ease of installation, image quality by day and night, notifications,  ease of access to video clips via the phone app

Cons: phone app is not robust.

[TomMac]

Power outages – I have thought about this but not implemented anything.  A small capacity uninterrupted power supply could keep the base station going through a blackout, but your household network would be down and so no Internet connection.

One thing of note... if you use a small UPS on the base only, it will continue to record to the USB drive ( speed sticks don't need extra power but some drives do ) when armed before the outage.

Mine has a pretty large UPS , but I do run the modem and router too .  It has gone about 3-4 hrs max so far without issue

[pc2k17]

Same here as TomMac. I have a UPS and have the modem, router, and arlo base plugged into it. My alarm system and smartthings have built in battery backups. With just those 3 things running off the UPS I get 4 hours of run time. Usually plenty of time for power to be restored. Alram system, smartthings, internet, and Arlo stays up so my house is still protected during a power outage.