Ultra 2 draining within 1 day

[havsgaard]

All of a sudden my two identical cameras are draining batteries from 100% to 0 in less than one day. Been charging them both to 100% twice the last week.

Did a test today, 100%, re-mounted it, after 3 hours it states 80% !

Have power cycled the bases station - but no matter - it does not help.

One things which is strange, when trying to fetch the activity zones on both cameras, they fail. The current picture showing is a still from several weeks back.

And no, nothing has changed in terms of network or surroundings - so please stop giving some "place it closer to base station etc.", this just happened all of a sudden and on both cameras. Firmware issue perhaps ?

[havsgaard]

This morning both cameras was down to 5% ... again.

I took both cameras offline before I went to work - for charging .... again

Having security equipment behaving this way ... reliability reliability reliability ... this is absolutely poor.

[jguerdat]

You've missed one big step to troubleshoot - reinsert the  battery to get the camera back to a known state. You may want to remove one camera from your account and set it back up if the battery thing doesn't help.

[havsgaard]

You mean, that even if I remove both batteries - charge them and re-insert them into cameras - like i've done several times this week - it is not enough ?

Removing from account and re-add - that is not a solution - that is a workaround to a problem which seems to occur quite often when browsing forums on various Arlo cameras, andmost likely something that will happen again. 

This type of issue should NOT happen at all in the first place. I've paid a premium price along a premium subscription fee - for something that 'might' work. That simply does not cut it for security equipment.

Arlo needs to fix these issues ASAP!

[BrookeN]

Please contact support. Within the app on your mobile device click on the silhouette on the top left ~ support center ~ the device that you are needing assistance with then choose the behavior you are seeing. 

[havsgaard]

4th time was the charm - whatever was wrong seems to have 'self healed'

Both batteries was ... again ... charged to 100%. 

After inserting batteries again, the activity zone was now showing proper live footage, and not some strange snapshot weeks old and the drain issue was magically no longer an issue.

However my trust in the setup due to this beahavior are close to 0 now !

I suspect this to be a base station/back-end issue - that is the only thing explaining why it all of a sudden happened with both cameras at the same time - should be looked into by devs asap.

What if I was away for a week or more, it happened all of a sudden, meaning it can happen again - I would have no possibility to fix that remotely.

[havsgaard]

Now back again with same issue - though only for one of the cameras this time. 

Been running as expected since beginning of May, where I made the last recharge of both cameras. 

All of a sudden one of the cameras drained from ˜80% -> 15% within one day, no-explanation-at-all.

The other camera still at 76%.

I then charged the camera to 55% - remounted it, now this morning it is drained, got message of low battery during the night! >(

This is completely unacceptable!

[havsgaard]

Pictures taken with 1 day between, how many times are enough?

[BrookeN]

Please contact support. Within the app on your mobile device click on the silhouette on the top left ~ support center ~ the device that you are needing assistance with then choose the behavior you are seeing.

[havsgaard]

I cannot update my case number 00622880 - says the token is invalid:

As was suggested by support, then I should lower sensitivity of both my cameras which i did lower to 75%.

One of the cameras, after two days, suddenly went from 8x% to 15% battery within one night.
The day after that, the second camera drained its battery from 60% to 0%.

Now, I have lowered both cameras to 70%, disabled the microphone, and set the sound sensitivity to low.
I cannot say if the problem is solved as I would need more time for it and the ticket should be extended.

However, lowering the sensitivity any further could jeopardize the whole purpose of the security camera as it might not catch any persons at all.

[StephenB]

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@havsgaard wrote:

However, lowering the sensitivity any further could jeopardize the whole purpose of the security camera as it might not catch any persons at all.

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For this, use the motion detection test to find the lowest threshold that reliably detects you when you are moving into the field of view of the camera.  Make sure you aren't more than 25 ft (7.5m) away from the camera.

Then set the detection threshold to something a bit above this value.

I also suggest turning off audio detection for now (potentially re-enabling it after you sort out the battery drain).  Similarly disable any activity zones, as those conceal the amount of video streaming the cameras are doing.