Bought brand new yesterday, and 2 cameras have low batteries.

[370fleming]

Hi. I just bought the 4 camera and base station set from Bestbuy yesterday.
I've had so many issues setting this up, and testing each time to make it work, that eventually I had to go spend another 200$ to buy a decent router so I can have my ISP modem bridged to make this already $500 investment work.
Now that I have everything setup and tested the battery levels were all at 96%. I didn't really care. However minutes later after only being up for 10 mins or so, I now see on my Arlo app telling me camera is at 22% battery and another is at 80% battery. The other two are holding at 96%.
This is unacceptable. So what I have to spend another hour driving, returning, driving back home, setting it all up mounting everything again.
That's unacceptable.
Will Netgear just send me new ones if they can log into my Netgear Arlo and as proof for them selves.
And I have very limited time as I have two jobs and a family to take care of.

[370fleming]

So now the one camera that was 22% is at 17%.
The one that was at 80% is now at 51%. The last two that were at 96% are both at 81%.
Is this some kind of joke? What happened to it lasting up to 6months.

[manofice]

It would actually cause you less stress to just return it at bestbuy and exchange it. Netgear will make you pay for the return if you go through them.

[jguerdat]

It's also worth power cycling the base and opening and closing battery doors to reset the indicators.  If it still indicates that the batteries have depleted that much, what are the total number of minutes of recording and live viewing on the individual cameras?  Spec life is for 5 minutes per day.  In addition, the WiFi strength/quality between the base and cameras can cause the camera to use much more juice.  Note that this has nothing to do with the WiFi from your router.

[370fleming]

Okay thank you both for the information and help.
3 cameras are within 2 meters of the base. One is 5 meters. And 1 is 10 meters away. The 10 meter one has the best battery life and least amount of battery drained.
The closest one to base station is the one that was at 22% and is now down to 5%. The other ones are at 50% now. I'm just gonna assume the batteries were drained for whatever reason from the manufacture.
Going back and doing this through bestbuy and exchanging doesn't guarantee me that the next one I exchange for won't have the same battery issues.
I have tried to power cycle everything and open and close the battery compartments with no change.
Why would Netgear make me pay its there fault. It's not bestbuy's.