Arlo Ultra Sensitivity constantly going off 60 feet from the street

[kenkol]

I purchased the Arlo Ultra Cameras to replace the Arlo Pro cameras I had in place. Reason was that two cameras with the wider field of view can do what four previous cameras were doing. My problem is with the activity zones and sensitivity. Three of the Ultras are having this issue to some extent. Two of the cameras are about 60 feet from the street and are constantly going off. They are going off so much that the one is down to 35% battery within four days of being online. I tried to set the actiity zone but the eror of being disconnected from the AC power is always there and right now there is no way to hook them up to any ac power to test it out being as any extras for the ultras have not been released yet. I have also tried lowering the sensitivity periodically to see if it helps and I am at 1% sensitivity right now and it is still going off all the time. Are there any solutions available for this?

[jguerdat]

Zones require either AC power or Smart. When using Smart, the cameras will always record but then the servers decide if motion was in the zone and then figure out what caused it. That could explain your battery usage.

Rotate you cameras down and.or change from Super Wide to Wide and see if you get enough coverage. We've been told that the PIR sensor range also changes with the video view, unlike the earlier cameras (Pan and Zoom) so that may help a lot.

[kenkol]

I am subscribed to smart and, as mentioned in other posts in the forums, I can check and uncheck different options, but still am receiving all notifications. For example, if I just want to see people, I get animals, vehicles, people and motion regardless of what is checked. I can rotate down I guess, but then I get about 1/3 of the view is the wall and garage door. I want the wide view to eliminate 2 of the cameras needed in the Arlo Pro setup I had thus reducing the cameras from 4 to 2. 

What you are saying is, since I have defined an activity zone and I am subscribed to Smart, the notifications I should receive should be filtered through the server with regards to the activity zone I defined?

If that is the case, then, no, it is not working like that.

Picture Arlo 1 is the activity Zone

Picture Arlo 2 is the car which triggered the vehicle notification

Picture Arlo 3 is the Bus which triggered the vehicle notification

[JamesC]

kenkol,

Vehicles are a much larger source of IR so they tend to cause false triggers more often. In this position, you may need to adjust the angle of the camera so that the street isn't in the field of view.

JamesC

[kenkol]

you can see it in the picture in the above reply, but I will include it here as well.

Also, From what I am gathering by reading these similar posts is as follows:

I can set up activity zones on my cameras and not have AC connected and subscribed to Smart. The server will decide whether or not the motion, be it animal, person, vehicle or just plain motion (whatever I have selected in smart setup) should be reported.

If that is the case, I can say it is not working. Look at the following pictures.

Arlo 1 is the activity zone setup

Arlo 2 is a car clearly outside of the activity zone

Arlo 3 is a bus clearly outside of the activity zone

This gets reported regardless of whether or not I have vehicle selected in the smart setup.

[kenkol]

Pic 3

[kenkol]

Pic 1 again.

[jguerdat]

Have you tried using the Wide (155 degree) setting for the camera? Also, the zones may not be exact - try shrinking it away from the street a bit. And you are subscribed to Smart, right?

[kenkol]

I will try that as well (The 155 wide) but this does beg the question; WHEN the cameras are 60 to 80 feet away from a high traffic area and WHEN you have the smart subscription and WHEN you setup an activity zone and WHEN you have the sensitivity turned down to 1%, WHAT is the actual area that will be monitored?

Better yet, a more simplified approach, What is the effective range at 100% and at 1% without activity zones? Is a pixel area that "changes" or some other criteria used to "detect" motion?

Changing the mounted angle of the camera would most definetly eliminate the high traffic areas in the view, but those areas are something we look at in a live view for instances like when the kids get on the bus in the morning. Something not needed for recording purposes, but just for viewing. Hence the activity area, or so I thought.

I will also play with the activity areas and see if I can figure out how much smaller will it be before I stumble upon the "sweetspot" where it doesnot detect the street, but the sidewalk (25 feet closer then the street).