battery problems

[jimmy85]

Hi, i know questions about battery life have been asked.

I've had my arlo cameras since end of July 2017. 2 cameras are still around the 50-60% battery mark (original batteries) but the other ones battery was going great then had dip and on the 12th Octobe,r i got the warning message and it died afew days after. i bought some panasonic ones put them in on 28th October and got the message 6 hours ago from Arlo saying 14% left, now its on 9%.

I am not happy at all, hardly any alerts going off. it was on best video but the others have been on that too and it is the closest to the router.

PLEASE HELP!!!!

[jguerdat]

It's possible they're just bad batteries but other possibilities exist, too. First, pop the batteries out and use a voltmeter to see what they read.  That can be quite telling, with fresh batteries being ~3.2v and dead ones about 2.75v. If they're still good, reinsert them but don't push them down - let the battery door do the pushing. Does the battery level look ok now?

The batteries are really in 2 sets - front and rear.  The camera will switch between them to maximize life.  If improperly seated, the camera will only run on one set, running it down quickly while the other set remains fresh.

Of course, it's also possible that the camera is faulty in which case opening a case with support will be needed.

[jimmy85]

jguerdat  Thank you for reading my post and getting back to me. I will try these asap.

[MikeBravo]

Since I can never find most of my previous posts to add on and create a history time line, I'll chime in here again to report another strange issue with my camera batteries.

Just a short while ago after a camera suddenly went from 45% to 4% overnight (and in significantly less time than advertised with even less use) and I was able to replace ONLY two (2) batteries and have it go back up to 98%, another camera now has suddenly gone from 45% to 15% overnight. 

First off, I don't understand the inconsistency in the notices. If one camera notiifed me at 4% why did another of the exact same type notify me at 15%?

Secondly, with this camera, my simple battery tested only showed on bad battery, the other three read as having full or near full charge. I replaced the bad one and the camera now reports at 84% which kind of makes sense to me. Trying to see the sense of this, at 84% that would mean that the two good batteries are at least 50% of that and be near full charge (since I've been told that the cameras use two batteries at a time and then switch to the second pair) and with one that failed, that would mean the one battery of the pair I didn't replace is at about 34%.

If that's the case, it would seem as if the camera was draining one of the two batteries in the pair faster than the other. It still wouldn't explain then why it suddenly showed only 15% life and why then it wasn't switching to the other two batteries registering at least 50% life left. 

One one hand its actually a good deal since I'm not replacing all four batteries at a pop, but on the other it makes it extremely difficult to know if I'm getting all the usage as advertised that I have paid for.