Arlo pro battery life

[Bt4run99]

First time user sorry if I didn’t post in the correct area. My Arlo pros are dying abnormally fast! I lose about 10% a day even on cameras that are switched off. I got these cameras Thanksgiving 2017. Haven’t had an issue since early May. I got a 4 months before having to charge my cameras. Now in a week and a half my cameras are 50%. Nothing has changed on my end. No new electronics, cameras in the same locations and base unit hasn’t been touched. Only thing that has happened is that update Arlo put out. I even have a camera I charged 2 days ago that has never been used only linked to the base station that is now at 91%. IT’S NOT EVEN TURNED ON!!!!!

[MRDUNCAN]

Negative....this didn't fix the battery life issue.

[pc2k17]

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@crw wrote:

What amazes me is that Netgear doesn't seem to care very much about the massive negative publicity they are getting with this Arlo product. It would seem to me that they would make this a top priority to solve, unless they are planning to terminate this product line.

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Arlo isn't going anywhere and I'm not sure there's much negative publicity as the company seems to be doing very well. From the netgear 2nd quarter results conference call transcript......

"The Arlo segment's net revenue came in at $104.8 million for the second quarter of 2018. This is up 33.1% year over year, or about $26 million from the prior quarter and up 8.9% on a sequential basis."

Hopefully the fix, for the users who have the battery drain issue, comes soon.

[HelloHelloP]

Exactly the same for me
Used to last 7 months now 3 week

[BGPunggol]

Try this: choose a appropriate time and reboot the base station daily. U'll find that it does somehow slow that the draining. My single cam drainage fell from 5% daily to 1-2% whenever I did this every morning. Not the best solution but better than nothing at all. The nex thing to get maybe a self timing switch to turn the current off and on if away.

[MRDUNCAN]

I see my cameras have the latest firmware but not the base station.  Base station is currently at 1.10.0.8_22190.  How do get the base station to installed the latest firmware which I think is 1.10.0.9_23037?

[jguerdat]

You have the latest base firmware now. You can check by looking in the Release Notes section here.

[mrshanno1]

I'm part of the field trial and I'm cautiously optimistic. I recharged both cameras to 100% on 8/29, received the trial firmware to base station on 8/31, and the cameras are at 97% and 94% (weaker signal on this one), although they are not triggered much, maybe couple times a day. I was once good on batteries for 5-6 months, and like many battery life was reduced to weeks since the may firmware update. Hopefully this will take care of our battery issues (crossing fingers).

[crw]

Are you keeping your cameras turned on and in alarm mode ? Or on with disarm mode ? Or off altogether ? How are you using your cameras ?

[mrshanno1]

I use schedule to arm my cameras... They are armed accordingly for about 16 hours out a day.

[crw]

Thank you. Please keep us informed. Also, who would we contact to get this test ourselves ??

[mrshanno1]

Moderator James C had a post on 8/29. There were a couple of hoops to jump through to join...

[MRDUNCAN]

My cameras are security cameras so they are active 24/7. They are probably triggered about 10 times a day. No change since I installed except for lowering the motion sensitive.

[Bt4run99]

I’d settle for 3 months at this point. But what’s so freaking hard to go back to how it was BEFORE May 15th update? IDGAF about all the other things they have tried to fix..... GO BACK AND PROBLEM IS SOLVED!!!!

[StephenB]

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@pc2k17 wrote: Arlo isn't going anywhere

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FWIW, it is being spun off into its own company ( https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/06/netgear-is-spinning-off-its-arlo-security-camera-business/ )

[pc2k17]

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@Bt4run99 wrote:
I’d settle for 3 months at this point. But what’s so freaking hard to go back to how it was BEFORE May 15th update? IDGAF about all the other things they have tried to fix..... GO BACK AND PROBLEM IS SOLVED!!!!

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If only it were that simple. I am in the field trials as well and I got rolled back to old firmware before may and now I have multiple problems with the system. I didn't have a single problem before the roll back, not even the battery problem, now I have a bunch of problems. So, from what I've witnessed, rolling back is a no go.

[LUser1526]

It is now September 5th, and I'm still/also having the same problem everyone else has been posting about here since June!!! I've only owned/installed this system for 3 weeks now, and one of my cameras drains 4% battery per day EVEN WHEN NO ACTIVITY OCCURS. Another of my cameras is still at 100% even though lots of activity has occured, so the battery indicator is obviously not accurate. I'm just waiting for the day that that camera battery indicator goes from 100% to 0% all of a sudden. Another of my cameras has been steadily losing around 1-2%, which is how it should be (and this is the only 3 of my cameras that has low wifi signal strength while the other 2 with issues are at full wifi strength).

[klam55]

Add me to the list.  Finally decided to research why my camera has had such poor battery life since around April/May.  I've been keeping track of my charging schedule. My charging schedule incidates the problem started around May to say the beginning of June when I noticed I was getting around 30 days of charge before the battery was drained to about 10%.  Prior to that I was consistantly getting close to 90 days of charge and down to around 30% charge before I decided to recharge batteries.  

Arlo, please get your act together and fix this.  

[MAGG]

And here I thought I might be one of the few with this problem. So many months and no fix?

I'm definitely taking them back to the store.

[crw]

I'm just so suroprised that Arlo/Netgear hasn't reached out at all on this platform to let people know what, if anything, they are doing about this. Really awful service from Netgear. 

[JamesC]

The engineering team is currently investigating reports from users experiencing battery drain issues. Currently, field trial firmware is being tested that should help resolve this issue. I will provide an update when I know more.

JamesC

[crw]

Thank you James. Any idea when you might have an update ? Do you have any preliminary results from the field tests you are running ? 

[carlovn66]

I am in the same boat. I only have one camera above my front door, fairly close to the base station. I set the mode via Smartthings and the IFTTT integration based on my Smartthings mode. On average, the camera gets triggerred only once a day when the mailman delivers our mail - a 45 second clip. 

My camera battery depletes by, between 4% to 6% on a daily basis. The strange thing is this: I have a Smartthings WebCoRE rule which polls the camera, at 5:00AM every morning and reports the battery percentage to my WebCoRE dashboard. When I come into the office just after 8:00AM in the morning, I log into the Arlo portal for my camera and the battery level would be between 4% to 5% lower than what had been reported at 5:00AM in the morning. This is with no activity on the camera at all. So, what is happening between 5:00 and 8:00AM??

And there is no ability to turn on or look at any possible logging for the system either.

I have resorted to restarting the base station on a daily basis (as reported earlier in this thread) and this does seem to limit the battery draining to only 1% daily. But again, there is no way possible, that I know of, to automate this process other than cutting and restoring the power to the base station automatically.

I would definitely NOT recommend this system to, or wish it upon, anybody else!!!

[Smarks]

So if I recall, Arlo support said the battery draining issue was caused from the night vision lights being triggered constantly due to a bug.  Has anyone tried disabling night vision to see what happens?  I will once I charge my cameras back up, AGAIN!

[klam55]

sure if you want to @Smarks, but I wouldn't want to conserve battery life to loose this feature even if it is a short term fix.

[pc2k17]

@Smarks

"Supports" notes must be a little old. The night vision IR LED lights coming on constantly and draining the battery was fixed months ago. The current battety drain issue has nothing to do with the IR lights coming on.

People have already tried turning off night vision and a dozen other work arounds. If you have the battery draining problem there is only one fix, new firmware, and Arlo has to provide it. (which is currently in beta testing now)