Accidentally deactivated one of my Arlo hubs

[DVoorhees]

I have 2 houses in different cities, with one Arlo hub at each house. Unfortunately, when I upgraded to the new Arlo iPhone app, both base units were assigned to the single default "Home" location. After struggling with the new modes and automations for a few days, I finally figured out that I needed to define a 2nd location so that I could define a separate set of rules for each base hub (and connected cameras), which I did. Then I added the Arlo hub at the LA house (and associated cameras) to the new "LA home" location. Everything looked good for a day or two.

Unfortunately, adding the LA Arlo to the new "LA home" location didn't remove it from the original "Home" location. The LA cameras got moved, but the LA Arlo hub now showed up at both locations. As a result, all of the automations that I intended only for the non-LA location affected both hubs - clearly not what I wanted, especially with geofencing rules.

So, I went to devices and tried to figure out a way to delete the LA Arlo hub from the non-LA location. Unfortunately, I didn't see anything except the option to delete/deactivate that hub. So I pressed the little "minus sign" in the upper left corner of that base hub, and was prompted with the message: "Are you sure you want to deactivate your Arlo device?". To which I replied Yes. I thought it was a good thing that the LA base hub had disappeared from the non-LA location.

The only problem? That hub (and the 2 attached cameras) was also removed from the newly created "LA home" location - which is completely empty, with no devices any more (no hub and no cameras). I have tried re-adding that hub, trying to treat it as though it was a completely new device - and that didn't work. The Arlo app tried for several minutes, but couldn't find the base hub. I tried that multiple time.

So I guess the question is: now what do I do? My guess is a factory reset would work, but I was hoping for a simpler solution (since the factory reset would also mean re-pairing the cameras)...

[BrookeN · Accepted solution]

Yes, you will have to factory reset the hub. That is the only way to reactivate it after doing the deactivation. 

[DVoorhees]

Thanks for the quick reply. By the way, is there some other way to remove a base hub from a specific location, once it has been assigned in the Arlo app? Or is deactivation (and a factory reset) the only way to do that?

[BrookeN]

This provides more information on how you can change the location of your devices:

https://kb.arlo.com/000062824/How-to-change-the-Location-of-an-Arlo-device-in-the-Arlo-Secure-App

[DVoorhees]

Ah, I wish I had seen that article before I tried to move/remove the base hub from the old location. I wish the message that popped up had said something like: "Are you trying to move your device to a new location, or do you want to remove it completely from your account?" That would have clued me in that I was doing something wrong...

[BrookeN]

I will bring this up to our development team. Thank you for providing that suggestion. 

[DVoorhees]

Hi Brooke, one more wrinkle: when I added the LA Arlo to the new "LA home" location, it also got added back to the original (default) "Home" location - so I'm back to the problem of having automations associated with the original Home location affecting both of my hubs, which is not what I want...

[BrookeN]

I see some on the home location and the LA location. There is five on the home location and two cameras on the LA location is that correct?

[DVoorhees]

And it gets weirder: because of the strange behavior around the LA Arlo base hub magically re-appearing in the default "Home" location, I set up a new (3rd) location called "Paso house", and tried to move the Paso Arlo hub to the new "Paso house" location. (I was assuming that there is something faulty in the design of the default Home location, so I was going to remove all automations from that location and only have automations for the new "LA house" and "Paso house" locations.)

Unfortunately, attempting to move the Paso Arlo, following the directions in the KB article that you referenced, gave me an error message that the location change had failed (sorry, I didn't take a screen shot) - but now the Location field for the Paso Arlo is blank - I can't even click on it or change it. Choosing the new "Paso house" location shows me a blank dashboard saying I need to add devices, so the Paso Arlo didn't get moved there. Choosing the default "Home" location shows both the LA Arlo and the Paso Arlo (which I have mentioned previously), but now instead of all 5 cameras that were paired with the Paso Arlo, only 4 are shown under Devices. And, I'm getting notifications about motion from several of the cameras that are paired with the Paso Arlo, even though all 3 locations (Home, LA house, and Paso house) are in Standby mode.

It seems like there's something seriously wrong here...

[BrookeN]

I see the Paso location, however there is no cameras on that location

[DVoorhees]

To answer the question in your reply (which posted while I was composing my own followup): yes, I have 2 Arlo base hubs (the LA one with 2 cameras, the Paso one with 5 cameras). Because of my recent fiddling, and my concerns about the default Home location, I now have 3 locations defined: Home, LA house, and Paso house. All 3 are in Standby mode. Nothing shows on the dashboard for the "Paso house" location; the 2 paired cameras show on the dashboard for the "LA house" location; and only 4 of the 5 paired cameras show up on the dashboard of the "Home" location.

[BrookeN]

Try these steps to edit the locations and see if you are able to move the camera

https://kb.arlo.com/000062826/How-do-I-add-edit-or-delete-a-Location-in-the-new-Arlo-Secure-App-expe...

[DVoorhees]

What do you want me to do, delete the new "Paso home" location? How do we fix the fact that the Paso Arlo (which is part of the "Home" location) has a blank location name now - it *doesn't* say that it's part of the Home location, even though it shows on that dashboard.

[DVoorhees]

I can't move the Paso base unit because I can't click on the Location field - it's blank, and has no dropdown.