Short battery life for Arlo Wire-Free Camera

[Minlee2704]

I purchased the arlo camera as an additional add on for my arlo pro. I installed it on the 16th, by the 18th, the battery life dropped to 15%. Is this normal?

[MikeBravo]

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@Minlee2704 wrote:
I purchased the arlo camera as an additional add on for my arlo pro. I installed it on the 16th, by the 18th, the battery life dropped to 15%. Is this normal?

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No, it is not, but its increasingly par for the course.

I have two cameras now that suddenly dropped from more than half charge left down to 22 and 12% respectively. The one camera that dropped to 12% the next day went back up to 24%. 

Arlo says they are aware of the problem. What that really means, I don't know. 

These two cameras have now been reading in the 22-24% range for more than two weeks which makes no sense at all.

To be sure its them and not you, you should check your batteries.

[JessicaP]

Hey @Minlee2704,

For your Arlo Camera, make sure you are using non-rechargeable batteries supplied in your package or from other high quality, such as Energizer or Duracell. Use this article to see how you can extend the battery life: How can I extend my Arlo Wire-Free, Arlo Pro Wire-Free, or Arlo Go camera's battery life?

[MikeBravo]

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@MikeBravo wrote:

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@Minlee2704 wrote:
I purchased the arlo camera as an additional add on for my arlo pro. I installed it on the 16th, by the 18th, the battery life dropped to 15%. Is this normal?

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No, it is not, but its increasingly par for the course.

I have two cameras now that suddenly dropped from more than half charge left down to 22 and 12% respectively. The one camera that dropped to 12% the next day went back up to 24%. 

Arlo says they are aware of the problem. What that really means, I don't know. 

These two cameras have now been reading in the 22-24% range for more than two weeks which makes no sense at all.

To be sure its them and not you, you should check your batteries.

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Well, its been over three weeks now going on a month after the two cameras suddenly dropped from around 60% to tthe 22-24% range and the two cameras still read 17% and 21% respectively. 

In the past when the cameras got this low they failed a few days later, so clearly the battery life being reported by the cameras is utterly wrong. 

The question now is, what crazy thing will happen next and will we ever be able to trust anything Arlo reports again.

[MikeBravo]

I see my latest post has already been deleted. So much for transparency and accountability.

Oh well, I'll continue and hope someone sees this before its deleted as well.

In line with what I have been posting about, I pulled down two of the cameras that I have posted about that suddenly dropped overnight from around 50% to less than 25% and then lasted another five weeks at that level. 

In each of them I replaced only two batteries as the other two were at or above 3.0v still. Now both are back at 100%. In the case of one of them, two months prior I had gotten the 'your batteries are tired' e-mail and pulled the camera down to find that all the batteries were at about 3.0v or slightly above. I merely shuffled their postions and put them back bringing the battery level back up to 78%.

This arrangement lasted another two months!

The other one had a similar experience in that two months prior I had replaced only two batteries after getting the message and those lasted another two months as well. It is that camera that I added two more new batteries only and that's back up to 100%.

So, as I have said previously, based upon our continuing experience, there are probably thousands of users out there throwing away batteries with plenty of life wasting tens of thousands of dollars. 

MinLee2704 or whoever, go ahead and delete this one too but its not going to change anything. Its only a matter of time before more and more of us are getting wise to your indifference.

[jguerdat]

You make an interesting observation about the batteries. The original Arlo uses two sets of two batteries and switches between them as they discharge. You can actually run the camera on 2 batteries in either the front or back slots. It may be that recent firmware caused that switching to not work right and worked off one set too much. Of course, it's also possible that you pushed the batteries down in their slots where they got stuck and didn't make contact with the battery door. If that's the case, be sure tosimply place the batteries in their slots and let the door do the pushing.

[MikeBravo]

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@jguerdat wrote:

You make an interesting observation about the batteries. The original Arlo uses two sets of two batteries and switches between them as they discharge. You can actually run the camera on 2 batteries in either the front or back slots. It may be that recent firmware caused that switching to not work right and worked off one set too much. Of course, it's also possible that you pushed the batteries down in their slots where they got stuck and didn't make contact with the battery door. If that's the case, be sure tosimply place the batteries in their slots and let the door do the pushing.

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jguerdat:


As I have explained here many times although many of my post have somehow been deleted, I follow all the advice given by experts like you. I ALWAYS let the battery door do the pushing. ALWAYS. This is too much of a major investment for us to be careless, foolish, or cavalier in handling this equipment. 

I have also invested far too much time into studying the behavior of the system which is how I learned that in most cases when the battery indicator shows the batteries as being fully drained, only one of two the batteries is actually fully drained and I can get the camera back up to 80-90% by merely replacing one or two batteries. 

This indicates to me that something isn't right. 

Lately, when I pull a camera down that reads 15-25% battery life remaining, I can often just shuffle the batteries aroud into different positions in the battery compartment and bring the charge indicator back up to 60-70% where it often remains for a month or even more before declining again. Its big inconvenience, but it is saving us a great deal of money.

Finally, the import aspect to this is that this situation is occuring with ALL our standard Arlo cameras. All of them. That's seven in total. All purchased through Costco. Is is possible that an entire production run of cameras, ones that were earmarked for Costco, were bad?

If it is a firmware issue, I don't understand why it can't be corrected unless the entire system is faulty. Surely Arlo has received back hundreds of cameras to examine and experiment with. 

On top of everything, one of the batteries that I received in our only Arlo Pro purchase seems to be not quite as strong as the others. I could try to return it, but have you ever tried to deal with Arlo customer service? Like Comcast and others, its seems as if Arlo's customer service is designed to get rid of customers rather than keep them.

Its a terrible shame because the convenience of wireless cameras is the key to its only appeal.

[JessicaP]

Hey @MikeBravo,

Do you have a case currently opened regarding the issues you are having? If so, please let me know your case info via PM. If you don't, I'd be more than happy to open a case for you and escalate it for you.

[MikeBravo]

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@JessicaP wrote:

Hey @MikeBravo,

Do you have a case currently opened regarding the issues you are having? If so, please let me know your case info via PM. If you don't, I'd be more than happy to open a case for you and escalate it for you.

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JessicaP;

I have been posting here for months about the various issues that plague my system in response to many other posters incurring the same problems. I have explained what they are in great detail adding to what many other posters have been experiencing along with me. 

The initial contact I had with your customer support when first acquiring my cameras and finding two of the three bad in one batch was so aggravating that I very near returned everything to Costco. Though I received replacements, one of the replacements was defective as well. Your folks made it an ordeal that I did not wish to repeat. Idon't have hours and hours and days to spend trying resolve what I learned hear was a virtual epidemic of problems. 

We have seven Arlo standard cameras and three Arlo Pros. We got them when we beganto encounter a serious issue with a new neighbor and now cannot do without them. Its just not possible anymore to send them all back, even one at a time. Judging by manyof the posts here, many others experiences were the same as mine and I don't intend to be someone's punching bag.

That many of my post complaining of specifics have been mysteriously deleted has convinced me not to waste my time. 

We already spend way too much time maintaing the cameras than we expected. For example, the adjustable mounting posts you provide do not work well at all. They're very difficult to tighten sufficently to hold the cameras in position and the threaded connectors are rusting. 

Its not just your hardware either, as I have posted along with others at great length. Your PC browswer based portal, though better than the Android phone app, has many quirks that make using it torturous. Sometimes when you go to view recorded motion captures, the recording aren't there until you exist and enter the page again. You can't view a camera for more than few moments as it will time out over and over. It usually takes upward of thirty seconds to activate a live view which makes the camera useless when trying to react to something you hear of see out where the camera is mounted. 

As annoying as that it, your Android app has become a joke owing to the last update a few months ago. Before that you suffered some buffering issues, but not so many as to cause you major problems. After the last update however, all you get when you try to view a live feed on the cameras is buffering, buffering, buffering, buffering, timed out. This is even if you are standing right next to the base station let along any distance from it. Where I used to be able to go out and adjust a camera using my Android smart phone, now all my phone is good for is to talk to the person inside who has to view the camera from a PC web browser as they talk me through the adjustments. 

All these things I am explaining are detailed here in hundreds of posts from other users. 

So far, I seem to be the only one stubborn enough to manipulate batteries rather than merely throwing them away indealing wtih the severe inaccuracy of the battery life the cameras calculate. Its a real pain, but I have no choice as batteries are extremely expensive and I have too much invested in our system to be able to start over with a new system. 

[MikeBravo]

So, here we go again with yet another outrage.

A standard Arlo that I installed fresh Duracells, exactly like the ones that came with the camera set, just two months ago went from 57% battery life last night at 9:00 pm to 2% this morning at 7:00 am.

This is yet another camera that experienced BELOW the usage that Arlo states should garner four to six months battery life.

Now, what I'm going to do AGAIN as with several of my other standard Arlos is take it down and shuffle the batteries around and I'll bet any of your tech reps that the life will pop back up to 50% or more.

[MikeBravo]

Since all my other posts have apparently been deleted, I'll reply to one of the only old posts left.

Once again, more mysteries with arlo camera battery life. This time two cameras, one an Pro and one a Basic, at the same time went from 60% overnight to 15% and 17% respectively. Over the course of the next week they declined ot 7% and 5% respectively, but then then one day after that, the Basic camera improved to 7% as well.

What's really amazing is that despite repeated e-mails warning that the arlo camera batteries are tired, now more than two weeks later even with more than several daily recordings on each they still read 7%.

So, I dare any of the techs to explain how out of ten cameras, three Pros and seven Basics, a camera can drop overnight from more than half a charge down to nearly empty and then stay there for nearly a month when in just about every other occasion when a camera reaches that low battery level if fails within a day or two.

Arlo really should admit that they have serious battery usage issues and warn its loyal customers, who are probably collectively squandering thousands of hard earned dollars, to check their batteries carefully not trusting what the camera tells them. 

[MikeBravo]

Follow up:

Two days after the cameras dropped to 7% and 5% respectively, they dropped to 2% and 1% respectively where they have been now for almost a week and going strong. 

This is very strange in that when I first deployed the basic arlos and they fell to 5%, the next day usually they went dead.

So, how suddenly can a camera read 1% for days and work fine?

[MikeBravo]

I don't think any of the Arlo techs can explain this one:

The arlo basic camera that had dropped to 1% is now suddenly reading 25% battery life.

Must have been the rain and warmup today.

[MikeBravo]

I was taken by surprise----though by now I shouldn't have been-----to discover that while I was closely montioring the antics of two of my cameras that were operating quite well for weeks at 2% and 1% battery strength respectively and then the one basic Arlo going overnight from 1% to 25% battery life that one of the other basic Arlos went overnight from 40% battery life to complete failure going offline!!!

Taking it down, I was not suprised but again seriously angry to find that two of its batteries were at practically full strength, one at 25%, and only one truly dead. Replacing the dead an tired battery with new ones has the camera back up and running at 95%.

Hey Arlo! How is this happening? If it isn't firmware, what is it and what, if anything and I ask that with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, are you guys going to do about it?

Well?

[jguerdat]

It really sounds like a battery connection problem, especially if the two good batteries were together (front or rear). I'm sure you're taking pains to not push them down and letting the door do the pushing but what about the cleanliness of the various battery connections, both in the wells and on the door?

It's also possible that there's an internal issue, causing the batteries to not switch sets like they're suspposed to.

[MikeBravo]

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@jguerdat wrote:

It really sounds like a battery connection problem, especially if the two good batteries were together (front or rear). I'm sure you're taking pains to not push them down and letting the door do the pushing but what about the cleanliness of the various battery connections, both in the wells and on the door?

It's also possible that there's an internal issue, causing the batteries to not switch sets like they're suspposed to.

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Been down that road many time so that by now I am extremely careful about how I load the batteries and secure the battery door. If it happened with just one or even two cameras, I might be convinced that this was the case, but with all seven of my cameras I never have had a situation where when replacing the batteries they were all uniformly used. All of the connections for all of the cameras appear pristine with no sign of damage or corrosion.

I noticed with my three Arlo Pros as well that when the camera says that the batteries are done, I can still measure a substantial charge remaining.

When I consider the awful lag that we all complain about the utterly frustrating mobile app performance I am more and more convinced that the product itself is either not properly programmed or not well enough made.

[Billsled]

I 3D printed new battery covers for my cameras so that I can utilize the micro USB port in the battery compartment to power them.