Ultra Battery Dead in 12 Hours

[benwszalek]

I just installed my new Ultra yesterday. It’s mounted on the roof of my house. It’s got the latest firmware, and the base station is only about 10 feet away so the signal strength is excellent. I don’t use the spotlight, and the motion sensitivity is set to 1, the lowest setting. Even so from a fully charged battery, the battery was dead within 12 hours.

I’ve read a few posts on here about the battery only lasting a week, or even 3-4 days, but 12 hours seems extremely low. It isn’t continuously recording. I looked at my library and it recorded a total of maybe 20 minutes worth of clips.

My plan was to install a solar panel on the roof to keep the battery charged, but if a fully charged battery only lasts 12 hours it seems doubtful the panel will produce enough energy to keep it charged? I’m concerned the battery may simply be defective, and I tried contacting support, but they said there was nothing they could do unless I factory reset the unit and set it up from scratch again- not sure what that would prove. As it is I’m going to have to crawl back up on the roof tonight to bring the camera inside and recharge it.

Do you think the battery is defective? How long does it typically take a solar panel to recharge the battery?

[StephenB]

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@benwszalek wrote:

I’ve read a few posts on here about the battery only lasting a week, or even 3-4 days, but 12 hours seems extremely low. It isn’t continuously recording. I looked at my library and it recorded a total of maybe 20 minutes worth of clips.

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FWIW,  Arlo's battery life predictions are  based on usage of 4000 seconds per month, 30 seconds per stream, and day/night events split 2:1 

20 minutes of recording over 12 hours is a lot more than that.  Did you have activity zones set up?  Activity zones mask the power load - every time motion is detected, the video is streamed to the cloud.  The cloud supresses video that is out-of-zone.  So you need to disable activity zones in order to estimate how much video streaming is really going on.