constant motion detection all of a sudden.

[Rawail]

@JamesC 

Hi James,

I have an Arlo VMC 5040 camera

I have set it up to be active throughout the night.

For the past week it has been constantly notifying of detection every minute and hence draining the battery. When I check the recording, there is nothing there visible being detected. I suspect it is a fault in the camera maybe? 

Why is this happening all of a sudden? I have had the camera since 2020 . This has never happened before.

What can I do to resolve the issue? Please help soon as I need this camera to work properly. Thanks . Rawail. 

[StephenB]

If you haven't tried removing the battery for a few seconds and reinserting it, then do that first.

The second thing to try is to restart the smarthub.

If neither helps, you can try a factory reset of the camera:

1. remove the camera from the account
2. open the housing and press the button inside until the camera LED flashes amber (~15 seconds)
3. re-add the camera to the account.

[Rawail]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply Stephen. I tried turning off the "all other motion" but that didnt help, the camera continuously was detecting "other motion" throughout the night.

I will try your suggestions tonight and see how it goes. Will confirm if it worked. Thanks

[Rawail]

Hi @StephenB ,

An update - before doing a restart of the smarthub or removing the battery of the camera, I thought I would first try creating an activity zone and see how that goes. And it worked! No constant detection notifications anymore. 

I think I will still do a restart and remove the battery on the weekend to see If that also helps - as I have never had to create an activity zone in the past. 

Thanks.

[StephenB]

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@Rawail wrote:

I thought I would first try creating an activity zone and see how that goes. And it worked! No constant detection notifications anymore. 

---

While that can eliminate the unwanted notifications and recording, it will help the battery drain.  That's because the zone is processed in the cloud.  The camera streams video whenever it is triggered.  If the Arlo Cloud doesn't find any motion in the zone, it supresses the recording and notification.  But the amount of streaming is the same as if there were no zones, and that is what drains the battery.

[jguerdat]

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@StephenB wrote:

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@Rawail wrote:

I thought I would first try creating an activity zone and see how that goes. And it worked! No constant detection notifications anymore. 

---

While that can eliminate the unwanted notifications and recording, it will help the battery drain.

---

Oops. It will NOT help battery drain due to the continued recordings.

[StephenB]

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@jguerdat wrote:

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@StephenB wrote:

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@Rawail wrote:

I thought I would first try creating an activity zone and see how that goes. And it worked! No constant detection notifications anymore. 

---

While that can eliminate the unwanted notifications and recording, it will help the battery drain.

---

Oops. It will NOT help battery drain due to the continued recordings.

---

Correct.  Sorry about the typo... 

[Rawail]

Hi,

Yes correct. I have set up the activity zone and my camera is scheduled for every night. The battery percentage has not moved in the past 3 nights since I set up the activity zone.

Thanks 

[jguerdat]

Sounds like something else changed since, as noted above, the activity zones does NOT help with battery life.