one camera keeps going offline

[peteG]

hello

i bought a 3 camera ARLO system yesterday, one of them keeps going offline, after syncing it works fine with full battery and wifi signal, then it goes offline and when I press the sync button nothing happens

any help would be good

[Vitesse]

Hello,

I performed the troubleshooting steps and the camera still does not work. When I re-installed the batteries the blue LED came on for a few seconds and it did not work. I attempted to sync the camera and when I pushed the sync button on the camera with the sync light flashing on the base station, no lights came on the camera. I tried this 2 times with the same results. Do I have a bad camera?

Thank you,

[KristynM]

Vitesse,

In order to isolate the issue you are having and to determine if you do have a bad camera, it is highly suggested for you to contact our support team. 

[nango415]

omg just purchased this 4 camera system everyting worked gret now 1 week later all 4 cameras are off line.......tec. walked me thru deactivating system only to wake up this morning to off line again......didn spend 500.00 on a system i have to have my husband pull cameras down from roof every day to get to sync them again!!! might be returning them to best buy so frustrated..... and I'm not a computer geek so dont understand half of this .

[Vitesse]

Good News,

I replaced the batteries in the offending camera and all is well again. The only issue I have left is that the push notification feature does not work. I have double checked all the settings on my iPhone and iPads and all are correct to receive the notifications, but that feature is not working. Any suggestions ro resolve this issue would be appreciated.

[KristynM]

Vitesse,

I'm glad to here that your camera is online again. With regards to push notifications on your iOS, have you gone through these steps provided in this article How do I enable and disable Arlo push notifications on my iOS device?

If you have gone through the steps and still unable to receive push notifications, kindly provide your iOS device model and iOS version?

I'm looking forward to your response.

[KristynM]

nango415,

Please consider doing the following troubleshooting steps:

1.) Deactivate your base station from the Base Station settings.

2.) Perform a factory reset on your base station. (Pressing the Sync and Reset button until all LED is Amber)

3.) Reconnect your base station to your account.

4.) Sync the cameras one at a time.

5.) Ensure that your upload speed is at least 1Mbps

In addition to the above troubleshooting, are you seeing your cameras offline through the WebUI or on a mobile app? 

I'm looking forward to your response.

[Oaklandia]

My camera goes offline and uses the entire fully charged battery in about 30 hours. These same batteries are recharged and used in other Arlo camera which lasts months in another set up with a different base station. Bought a new camera and spotted it for the troubled one yesterday and it did the same thing and went offline and drained the batteries in about a day. So, I feel it's a base station issue. This system only used one or two camera and it seems like camera position one always had the issue and camera two has it almost all the time. The camera seems to want to record all the time no matter what sensitivity level and even when placed on a dark closet with no activity.

[JamesC]

Oaklandia,

Welcome to the community! If the camera is always recording this will definitely cause battery drain. To further isolate the issue please consider relocating the camera to an area with less motion traffic and see if the battery drain issue still occurs. The location of the base station itself could also be causing an issue. You might consider moving the base station closer to the location of the camera to avoid any possible interference between the two. Let us know!

JamesC

[Oaklandia]

Thanks for trying to help. I have two systems and the one at home works great with two cameras. This one is for my office and I exchanged the camera and the constant recording feature is not a problem anymore, but the constantly going off-line in less than 12 hours is an issue with the system often reported on this disucssion is now a problem. The batteries still seem to drain way too fast at the office and I've even exchanged some batteries from home with the office. Office dropped to two bars after about a week but Home camera lasts several months (about 3.5 months) and actually record more activity on average. I've exchanged the base station with a new one two days ago and the camera goes offline constantly. Today, I've changed out the camera to yet another new one so will see if all new equipment is causing the same symptoms.  I'm connected to a Netgear WNDR4500 "N900" router in this config which is different than the home system which is using an Apple Airport Extreme Gen 6 router.

Another difference is the schedule. The home system is always in the same mode 24/7. The office has a far lower sensitivity setting and doesn't send emails during working hours but is set to be far more sensitive and email recordings at night and all through the weekend.  At first, I thought the camera went off-line when the modes were changing, but now I see a camera just go offline in the middle of a scheduled time.

[Oaklandia]

Is there a way to see when a camera goes offline?  Right now, I can only tell by being logged into the Arlo Web Portal. It's only happened two or three times as I'm on it.  Since I only check in a few times a day (hopefully, I won't need to check in so often when the camera stays online). At this time, about the longest the camera can stay connected to the base station is about 24 to 36 hours. I logged in this morning and see hte camera is offline. The only way to remotely get it back online is to reboot the base station. Battery down to 2 bars in about 3 days from being full. These same batteries last about 6 weeks before they lose a bar in my home installation.  Since all the equipment has been changed out and all the HW and FW versions are identical to the ones at home, I feel it is the router (using the Netgear N900 mentioned in the last message) having some kind of issue?

The range is now 10 feet between the camera and base station. Don't think it's a range issue.

Any ideas on what this could be?

[JamesC]

Oaklandia,

A camera that is not detecting motion or streaming is basically in a sleep state. The camera is not active unless a mode is set that contains a rule indicating the camera should wake up and record when it detects motion. If a camera is offline due to drained batteries or it is out of range that will be indicated upon logging in to your account and navigating to the cameras screen. If the camera is frequently going offline it could be due to interference from another electronic device that is making it lose communication with the base station. This could also explain why the batteries are draining quicker due to the camera struggling to maintain that connection. Consider relocating the camera or the base station or both and see if you get the same results.

Let us know!

JamesC

[stormyghost]

Right now, I only have one camera. The base station and one camera are less than 10 feet apart. Full battery charge (and not rechargable batteries). I have to "reboot" at least once a week. This system is unreliable and I will not be purchasing any more cameras.

[Teamloulou]

I have the same problem, can somebody contact me please. 

[Oaklandia]

I've reset the WiFi router (Netgear N900 mentioned in prior posts). Put in new batteries (rechargables that average about 3 to 4 months from my Arlo home system). With fresh batteries on Oct 13,  I got an alert today (Oct 19) that the batteries are run down to 0% in the office Arlo. During the 6 days, the system recorded 83 clips of 10 seconds in duration using "Optimized" quality.  The good news, the camera stayed connected all 6 days. The bad news is 6 days is ridiculously short to be changing batteries. I had to wait almost 3 months for the Arlo cameras at home to drop down to 2 bars (with nearly 150 clips at 10 seconds each) just so I could re-charge the batteries and run this test with a different set of batteries.  I'm not able to identify any type of intereference going the 10 fee from the base station to the camera and the Home unit goes much further (one is almost 200 feet away from the base station and still hasn't run down to two bars after running a month). 

For other readers, keep in mind that the base station and camera on October 13th trial are both new and replaces the base station and cameras which exhausted batteries in a day or two and also lost base-station connection at least a few times a week and sometimes a few times in a single day.  Because I swapped multiple cameras and registered them to the base-station at the office where the problem is, I could tell the cameras are probably performing fine as any cameras moved to the home's base-station performed as expected while any brought to the office would have problems.

[twalsh17]

My third camera from top just went offline too.  Did you get a fix from Arlo?

[JamesC]

twalsh17,

There are a few different things that could cause a camera to go offline. To isolate the issue further, consider the following troubleshooting steps:

1. Replace the batteries with a fresh set. If batteries are depleted the camera may go offline.

2. Check the WiFi signal strength. If a camera is too far from the base station, or struggling to maintain connection with the base station if may go offline.

3. Limit any other nearby devices that could be interfering with the cameras connection with the base station.

If you're still experiencing this issue. Consider relocating the base station or swapping the location of the affected camera with a camera that is behaving normally to further isolate the issue. Please let us know the results!

JamesC

[rayjbell]

I have two cameras and the one closest to the base station has been offline for a week.  I cannot troubleshoot because I bought this system as security for my home while I was out of the country.  Both cameras worked fine for a month and now one is offline.  It briefly came back for about 5 hours then offline again, and now I am 8,000 miles away!!!   Not exactly a good ad for home security.....   If they are so unreliable (based on all of these complaints) why sell them?

[TomMac]

There was a major software update this past weekend due to the new Q cam coming out... as you can suspect there have been a couple of bumps along the way.

Or it could have gone defective, bad batteries bad, etc ... it's an unknown.

My system has been running since Dec 2104 with very few outages. One of the things I do recommend to people with systems far away is a small UPS to get the base thru small power outages... there have been cases where the base looses contact with the cameras due to power dropouts

[Savoy-Texas]

I have 9 Wire Free cameras and it is number 9

[JamesC]

Savoy-Texas,

It could be Interference or range causing the camera to drop offline. Consider swapping locations of the affected camera with a camera that is behaving normally to further isolate the issue.

JamesC

[TobyLE]

No update after 8 months? Not great customer service.

[Scottwod]

Same issue with third camera going off line. Your post re an engineering solution was posted a year ago. Is there a fix to this?

[JamesC]

Scottwod,

If it is a single camera behaving this way it could be that the camera is going offline due to an issue with it's location (poor signal strength due to range or interference). You can isolate this issue further by swapping the affected camera with a camera that is behaving normally to identify if the issue follows the affected camera.

JamesC

[Rudy]

I have seen this issue as well, it started happening after the last update. It seems to happen more often as the batteries weaken on a particular camera. I was able to bring the camera back by rebooting the base station, in some instances i would have to reboot the basestation three or four times and wait after each reboot to see if the camera comes back.

Rudy

[Xant76]

I have been reading these post and am about to go return my 4 camera system as i also have this issue with one or all cameras going offline. They are all within 20 feet of the base station. In less than 24 hours one or all have gone offline multiple times.