Skunk vs Cat

[JK2015]

Been having some issues with degraded motion sensitivity, increased lag time and the camera just downright missing things.  When I first fired up Arlo about 3 months ago - it caught everything - awesome.  Recently I had to adjust the sensitivity of a camera to get it to catch anything – not awesome

I have one camera set up looking straight at the side of a garden shed where a skunk has decided to to call home/maternity ward - ack.  I set the camera at a 90 degree to the shed so that anything coming by (or going under) has to pass across the FOV.  Last night critters set off one of my camera twice.  Once I caught the tail of the large skunk going off camera at the end of the 30sec recording time.  Came out, walked about and nothing until it walked out of frame 30seconds later.  The other a cat walking across the entire FOV.  That got me to thinking.  How does the PIR miss the skunk and get the cat walking in the same area the same way - hummmm.  Has to be something about the IR signature - big fat skunk, small IR signature, small feral cat large IR signature?  Body temp of a skunk 93, body temp of a cat 103.  

Several questions started running through my head.

If the ambient (yes, I say ambient in my head) air temp is 75 and a 93 degree skunk didn't set it off and a 101 cat did does that mean there is there an amount of deviation necessary to set it off?  

What if the ambient temp is greater than the object?  Oh let’s say air temp 110degrees and a 98.6 degree object passes in front - what happens then?

I have noticed that there has been quite a bit of questions regarding the loss of sensitivity – is that a known issue that I need to know about?

Thanks

JK

[JamesC]

JK2015,

You could try a different camera in the location of the camera that is behaving oddly. This would point toward to issue being the location of the camera or potentially the camera itself.

Also, consider taking a look at this article to be sure your camera is placed for best performance: Optimizing motion detection performance on Arlo Wire-Free cameras

JamesC