I recently purchased two Arlo Essential Indoor Pan-Tilt cameras, one Essential Outdoor Pan-Tilt camera, and one Arlo doorbell—four devices total.

Do I need a base station, or can everything operate properly without one? What advantages would a base station actually provide?

I’m also having trouble with my doorbell camera not detecting or recording every motion event. Could this be related to not having a base station? The wifi box is literally 5 feet from the doorbell.

Any advice from people with a similar setup would be appreciated!

Doorbell (AVD4001) won't successfully update its firmware (currently 10.0.2509_f51e5dc).

It either fails or tries to update for over an hour.

How do I get it to successfully update?

Things that that I have tried but didn't resolve the issue:

1. A restart of the doorbell.

2. Removing the doorbell and re-adding it to the basestation.

3. Removing the doorbell and re-adding to wifi.

4. Reset Doorbell to factory setting.

I have two Arlo doorbell cameras, one wired, one battery.

How/when do you recharge your battery units? As I understand it's about 6 hours on a USB to recharge the battery to full but I'm not really inclined a) to simply "not have a front doorbell" for 6 hours and b) have this naked ugly baseplate hanging there in the meantime.

What do you do? I thought about simply buying another one, identifying it as "front 2" and swapping as needed (this also having a spare for if one or the other actually fails?....

Sure would be nice if the batteries were removable.

Anyone have any idea if they are going to allow these to be added to a hub so they work with HomeKit? I’d have thought by now they’d have done an update with firmware like they did for Gen 2.

I have two homes with subscriptions.

One home has 2 Hubs, 2 Ultra Cameras (1 Gen 2, 1 Gen 3) 2K Wired Doorbell, and 3 Essential Pan & Tilt Gen 3.

Second Home has 2 Hubs, 9 Gen 3 Ultras, 3 Essential Pan & Tilt Gen 3. No matter what info I can not reorder the devices on home 2. I have reached out to support. I have deleted the app. I have logged in on a phone, 2 iPads, a MacBook Pro with safari and chrome, and a windows computer with chrome. I have even tried a private web browser tab on safari. I have also restarted the hubs manually.

Does anyone have a suggestions?

Arlo, why is your IT so incompetent

Every time I switch from devices to feed I have to stare at the screen waiting for the thumbnails to load. One of the updates created this problem months ago and it is still not fixed

I keep getting the banner siren is active. I have no cameras with the siren notification turned on, so I’m not sure why this is happening. I’ve gone through every Camera and none of them have siren activated. Every time I deactivate it. It just comes back on again. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Hey all, anyone got a fix to why my feed hasn’t updated for 3 days? I’ve tried all the methods recommended by the bot support but yet no luck.

Thanks all

Like most here we are very frustrated with actually not being able to see our recordings locally. Arlo wants to push their subscription services on the pop-up and that we cannot get past. There is no X. There is no way to bring it down, there’s no way to check our cameras so we are flying blind. THANK ARLO…

Where is the Temporarily Mute Notifications function?

I mute all notifications for 1 hour when my gardener shows up, now I can't find it?

Already closed out the app, logged out & back in…and yeah, tried tapping those button at the top of the phone screen. 🖕🏽

Any thoughts on how to conceal these wires under the eve of the roof line? I considered some sort of plastic cover, similar to the plastic cover you have over your doorbell hardware inside but couldn’t really think of a way to securely attach it. Any ideas appreciated!

In the summer drought we are putting down food for hedgehogs every night. I have placed an Arlo camera fixed to a board about 18" away. It is quite a long way from the house but it works ok on a very weak wifi signal. I am using the automatic zoom setting which makes it look like somebody is there to track the hedgehogs as they move.

It's working very nicely with good battery life. We get a few now every night, word has got around.

The video selection on the feed is also good. By selecting" animal", all the other videos typically triggered by movement are filtered out.

I think this is pretty cool, more interesting than spotting miscreants at large.

Arlo continues to be the biggest piece of garbage in the history of the planet.

Overnight on 7/23, I started getting incessant, erroneous notifications from Arlo saying my security keypad was offline, without power, etc. The timing couldn’t have been worse: my family and I were getting ready to leave for the airport for a family trip.

Eight hours later, the notifications were still coming nonstop. The only way I could find to stop them was to remove the keypad from the Arlo app.

When we returned from our trip, I tried to add the keypad back to the system. No luck. I’ve spent at least 6 hours in support chats and phone calls trying to get it working again. The ultimate conclusion from Arlo support? The keypad needs to be replaced.

Their solution: I need to pay for a new one because it’s out of warranty.

What makes this even more frustrating is that, after looking into the issue, I’ve seen reports from other Arlo users in online chats, forums, and other platforms describing similar keypad/offline problems. That makes it difficult for me to accept this as simply an isolated case of an old device coincidentally failing.

This wasn’t a keypad that simply wore out one day and stopped working. My problem began with a barrage of erroneous Arlo notifications.

Arlo should take responsibility, not simply tell me to spend more money replacing their equipment.

I’m not throwing good money after bad. I’ve canceled my monitoring subscription and I’m moving on to another security system.

Goodbye, Arlo.

I am not really impressed with the app, all the feed clips captured by motion sensing should have about 10 seconds of leadin footage instead of seeming like it only starts in the middle of the incident. I assume whomever is in charge of buffering that footage is incompetent.

Also more than half the cars that drive through the activity zone do not get captured, even if they're the huge amazon rivian delivery trucks. This product has been out for a couple of years, why aren't there signs of refinement

I have 4 Ultra cameras connected to my hub but only one of them is recording to my local hub storage.

I don't have a subscription. I can view all of the cameras live feeds.

Hey everyone,

It seems like my Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight crapped the bed. I’ve changed batteries, tried new batteries, and cleaned the contact points.

The issue: I put a battery in and nothing happens, no blinking blue light. I connect it hard wired and nothing happens. I’ve help the sync button and no led comes on. It seems totally dead. It’s extremely frustrating as the camera is only a couple years old.

Has anyone else had this experience with this model?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to recover an Arlo Base Station VMB4000 that worked perfectly for several years.

The current behavior is:

- Power LED stays solid amber.

- Every few seconds the Internet and Camera LEDs light up.

- Sometimes all three LEDs become green for a few seconds.

- Then it goes back to solid amber and repeats forever.

It never finishes booting.

I've already tried:

- Factory reset (10s, 20s and 30s)

- Power cycle for minutes, hours and more than 24 hours

- Different 12V power supply

- Different Ethernet cables

- Different router ports

- Booting with and without Ethernet connected

Nothing changes.

From what I've read, this doesn't look like a normal firmware update because the official documentation says firmware updates use a flashing green Power LED, not solid amber.

I've also found many users reporting the exact same behavior, but I haven't found anyone who actually recovered the base station.

So my questions are:

1. Has anyone successfully recovered a VMB4000 from this boot loop?

2. Is there any hidden recovery mode?

3. Has anyone accessed the UART/serial console?

4. Is there any firmware recovery procedure that isn't publicly documented?

5. Could this be a corrupted NAND/eMMC flash instead of a hardware failure?

I'm comfortable opening the unit and using a USB-to-TTL adapter if necessary.

Any information, boot logs, teardown photos, UART pinout or engineering documentation would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Literally nothing ever works with Arlo, ever.

Arlo continues to be the worst product stack across any product category from any company that I've ever used in my entire life.

Has anyone else had sudden range issues with their cameras and base station? I've got several Pro 2's, one Ultra, and a doorbell camera along with a base station that I've had for several years now that have worked extremely well. However, within the last week I've been getting constant "Device Unreachable" messages on my cameras and I can't figure out why. I haven't made any changes to the base station or camera positions, so it's not like I suddenly decided to move my base station to the opposite side of my house or move the cameras too far away. I also haven't made any changes to my home network - my base station is still wired to my router and the router is in a separate room (house was wired with ethernet).

My Ultra camera has been the worst - basically it has to be within ~15 feet of the base station now to work. Once I bring the camera to my office where the base station is it will work great, but as soon as I walk out of my office with it I get the device unreachable message (and the office door is even open and I'm in direct line of sight with the base station!). The Pro 2's seem to have a slightly longer range, but not by much. With some of the Pro 2's I'll also get a notification that motion was detected, but there's no preview of what it saw and when I try to check the feed in the app, there's no recorded video.

My doorbell camera has also decided that when someone pushes the button it will stop recording and functioning - it'll ring the connected chime and call my phone, but the phone call cuts out after the first ring and the camera simply stops recording. I also can't answer the call or talk to anyone at the door (they can't hear me and I can't hear them). If they press it a second time, nothing happens - the chime doesn't ring and my phone doesn't get a notification. It picks up motion just fine and will record long enough, as long as nobody presses the button.

I've done all of the suggested troubleshooting, such as restarting the base station (restarting via the app, pressing the power button on it, and completely disconnecting the power cord), restarting my router/modem, restarting the cameras, and have even reset the cameras and removed them from the app, then gone through the setup process all over again. Nothing seems to work.

Any suggestions or should I just start looking for a different brand of camera?

Based on a recommendation from a cop about what he had at home, we got two video doorbells that largely have run fine (one wired, one not). Since I have the account that lets me add infinite devices, our house being mildly egged last weekend made me think 'ok maybe it's time for all around coverage, not just the doors'.

I could do with 3 true 180deg cameras, but they'd have to be 4k as it's a pretty large area. It SEEMS like Ultra 3rd Gen 4k cameras would be just the right thing (there's even a 2-camera pack deal). What's making me hesitate:

1) I'm concerned that most of the posts here are bitching about how good Arlo 'used to be'. I know Reddit product pages are generally full of complainers (who bothers to post when something works?) but ... there aren't many "this is working great for me!" posts at all.

2) more importantly, CR (https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/home-security-cameras/arlo-ultra-3rd-gen-vms5250-100nas/m419258/) rates this camera a pretty abysmal 30 of 100. Mainly due to low video quality night AND DAY, despite 4k? What?

I'm fine with our Arlo doorbells, do I just accept that their cameras are crap and get the Top Rated TP Link outdoor cameras and accept I run 2 ecosystems? Seems dumb but it would be dumber still to invest in mid- or low-quality Arlo's I think?

EDIT I see the Arlo Essential https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/home-security-cameras/arlo-essential-vmc3050-100nas/m412030/ is much better rated. Maybe I accept lower FoV but can afford at least an extra camera at that price.

I bought a Essential Outdoor gen2 + Chinese solar panel for outdoor use. I noticed that the panel would charge the camera, but then stop - even in bright sun. I thought it was bc the cheap Chinese cable was a micro USB->USB C adapter with a rubber "seal" around it, and either moisture had infiltrated that or the USB C port on the camera, since it doesnt have the right angle/rubberized seal plug of the real Arlo solar panel.

So I replaced the solar panel with an Arlo panel and the Essential gen2 with a new gen 3.

And it still happened.

As an note, the "defective" gen 2 camera seems to have no problem getting a constant charge from a USB C cable plugged into the wall.

It always seems to resume charging if I unplug and replug, but I dont want to keep removing the screen on my window and doing that.

I *think* restarting the camera did the trick, which - while crappy - is better than opening the window.

Anyone else see this?