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Last week New Camera (battery) disconnecting or losing Live view

MrRongoose
Community Member

I have 10 Nest cameras total. 3 original, 2 Outdoor, 1 doorbell wired, and 6 battery. All my battery ones are wired to AC power for 24 hr recording.  The battery ones have been working fine for a few months now, since they came out. Starting 2 weeks ago, I started losing the ability to view them live. All of them. It says the camera might be saving battery message but they are all wired. If you go to settings it even says plugged in. History and recordings all still work but no live viewing. One of them keeps showing offline too now. Unplugging them for a minute then plugging back in restores the live view. The one that says offline, I have to remove from magnet and push restart button. Anyone else getting this? They had been stable, but this last week have been terrible. Bad update maybe?

14 REPLIES 14

BG
Bronze
Bronze

Wow! Someone with more cameras than me! lol
A couple of things that I can think of:

1 ) Make sure you have adequate connection strength. Just because it is "connected" doesn't mean it is adequate. I was having the same issues, and I finally replaced my wireless router, and it made all the difference in the world. Your router has to have enough hardware to handle more devices and priority since technology is expanding in leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, people tend to buy and add many newer devices and the router is the last to be replaced and never considered. I bought a ASUS RT-AX86U, and it has a 4 core cpu and plenty of RAM, and is designed for large homes. (not trying to sell anything), but it was the best thing I did. It solved all my problems.

2) Make sure your internet plan has enough upload bandwidth. I have 6 Nest Cam (floodlight), and a Nest Hello doorbell, Nest Thermostat, 35 lights, plugs, etc. etc. and you have to realize that suddenly, all your devices, including cameras have to "serve" from your home. Your home/router needs to have the ability to serve/stream to the internet. I'm sure your download speed/bandwidth mps is fine, but what about the bandwidth for your upload speed? Once I added the 7th camera, I was maxing out my upload bandwidth and it did get a little sluggish viewing all 7 cameras at once, outside the home.

These are just a few things to consider. The router made the biggest difference and solved other device connections, not just the video. I like that it has only one SSID and maintains the dual band on the backend. (2.4 and 5GHz), it is also WiFi 6. The cameras are dual band as well and will connect automatically to either band. I have all my cameras set on Max video, so serving (streaming) from my home is pretty hefty when I'm viewing everything.

Good luck.

 

MrRongoose
Community Member

Thanks for the reply. Using Nest Wi-Fi Mesh for the cameras and the cameras in question have good coverage and low interference, per a separate scan. We have gig fiber and average close to 900 up and down so I don’t think it’s that. The thing that gets me is that for the last several months I haven’t had an issue. Two Mondays ago, all the battery cameras started started doing the same thing. All in different locations of the house. The older models have no issues.

MrRongoose
Community Member

I bit the bullet and did a factory reset on all of them. What a pain. Day 2 though and haven't had the issue plus the cameras seem to be responding quicker. Maybe a coincidence. Knock on wood. Time will tell. Something to note, when the camera is doing this, removing from Google Home app to reset will not work. One camera I unplugged for 30 seconds so it came back to live view and that one reset when I did from the app but the ones that did not had live view did not reset, even though it was connected. Had to climb up and hold the button on those

Custmer
Community Member

 I have 4 cameras and this exact thing just started happening to 1 of them as well.

MrRongoose
Community Member

Spoke too soon. Of the 4 I reset, 3 are still working but 1 now shows offline again. The odd thing is, even though it's showing offline, I'm still getting immediate notifications for motion and it's still recording. I tried to restart it and now nothing. Doesn't even light up green anymore. Will contact Google again but it sure looks to me like a bad firmware push

SdeGat
Community Member

Same problem here. I have one wired in doorbell and it went offline. 
It’s cold over here and made sure it was wired in properly to avoid battery issues. The kind I am experiencing now. 😫

Could it be that my transformer is not powerful enough? 🤔

Doorbell transformerDoorbell transformer

@SdeGat 

These are Google's stated requirements for doorbells:

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9247132?hl=en

Yes. Thanks @MplsCustomer.  I don’t think the doorbell should go offline though even if the battery gets discharged, right?

(I noticed it was actually still responding to movement while it is offline 🤷🏻; looks like a software problem maybe?)

Agreed. Mine are the same. Showing offline or unreachable yet I get live notifications from the camera. Hopefully engineering can track it down

Brad
Community Specialist
Community Specialist

Hi there,

 

Just checking in to see if you still need assistance with this issue. If so, please let me know and I would love to look into this further for you!

 

Best Regards,

Brad.

SdeGat
Community Member

I don’t know about @MrRongoose but I still do. 
Mine has stopped working even though it is connected 🙁

Brad
Community Specialist
Community Specialist

Hey Folks.

 

At this time, I'll go ahead and lock this thread. If you're still experiencing problems, feel free to start a new thread and we'll be happy to help.

 

Best Regards,

Brad.

MrRongoose
Community Member

Yes. Still doing it every few days. Need to kill power to get it to go to battery mode to reconnect.

MrRongoose
Community Member

Looks like it's a Google side issue to me. Working with Engineering on my case. All same symptoms, started at the same time a few weeks ago. Unplugging so it cycles to battery reconnects it in most cases