Experiencing significant motion delay and detection issues

[OUGrad05]

Hello Arlo community 🙂

We recently purchased an Arlo system to give us additional home monitoring capability.  All of the cameras are outside.  Overall the system seems to function, we can pull down live feeds somewhat reliably.  

However, we are having fairly significant problems regarding motion detection.  For example, the camera over the garage views our entire driveway and the other over the front porch views our porch and walkway that approaches the front door.  In both cases I get numerous false detections each day.  Today I had 7 from the driveway and 9 false detections from the porch.  

Yet they both manage to miss significant motion events like pulling our CARS into the garage, both leaving and coming home were completely missed by the camera over the garage.  

UPS delivered a package today and while it did trigger on the front porch it was so late all I got was the back of the guy as he left our porch.  

We're still well within the return policy so if this is a flaw that isn't fixable I'd prefer to know now.  

Right now motion detection is set at 80% on all cameras, this was the default, playing with it hasn't seemed to change much so I left it at 80%.  

The firmware in all cameras is up to date as of nine days ago.  

Really looking for help or suggestions.  

[jguerdat]

It's fixable by changing the position and/or angle of the view.  The usual issues are:

- Too much scene being monitored.  Isolate it down to what is truly important.  You don't want to be seeing the street, in general.

- Motion is best detected by moving ACROSS the field of view, not directly at the camera.  Set the camera so the motion will usually be picked at or near an edge.

Posting screenshots of the camera views is helpful.

[OUGrad05]

Thanks for the reply.  

I changed both camera's this past weekend to decrease their field of view and ensure the street was not visible on either one.  There was a portion of the street visible on the garage camera which was triggering some of the events last week.  Moving the camera to have a smaller field of view has resulted in more misses (i.e., cars being backed in and out for example) this week.  Also, last night to take the kids trick or treating we all walked out of the garage, there were 6 of us standing in the driveway walking, pulling a wagon, etc and nothing, not a thing...but 15 minutes prior they did detect my in-laws pulling into the driveway.  It's very hit/miss and very furstrating.  

The front porch camera has limited positioning options, I've already got it aimed down far enough to see the porch and walkway while eliminating a street view.  Tilting it down anymore would minimize your ability to see faces of people as they approach and tilting up will capture the street.  I've got it positioned so that as people take the walkway up to the door they walk from left to right across the field of view.  Only other option is to hang the camera from an eve of the house, which I could do but will impact the ability to see faces.

One thought on the porch camera, I could position it more to one side of the doorway to see if that helps but suspect that the changes would be minimal.  It's also a real pain in the butt to put screws into bricks.  So if I go that route I may have to find a way to temporarily mount to see if I get expected results prior to permanently mounting.  Welcome thoughts on that as well.  

I can try to get a few pictures this evening when I get home.