I've had my Google Nest outdoor camera for almost two months and there's a lot of things I really like about it. Picture quality is excellent, sound and speech work great, and it's easy to configure for general operation and usage. With the $6/month subscription service I get all the videos and history files I would ever need.
However, it has one glaring drawback which is simply that it doesn't capture all events, especially at night, when on battery power. I am satisfied with the events captured during daytime, but at night it seems to miss almost everything.
Please don't take me back through all the basics again! Yes, my network connection is fine and I tried all the various configuration settings that might be relevant. Reset, and reset to factory defaults have been done several times with no change.
I have it installed in an excellent location right next to the garage door with good visibility out to the street and along the side of the house. There's a lot of activity with people and animals walking during the day, and cars drive by all day and into the late evening. The paper gets delivered every morning at 3 AM like clock-work, so it should capture that every time (but never has on battery).
With battery only I capture practically nothing at night. The limit seems to be from about 9 PM to 7 AM in the morning. This makes it completely useless as a security camera as most criminal activity occurs at night. My wife wanted to pull it out and be done with it, but I did a last lbit of troubleshooting and finally got it working. Now it captures ALL events, I mean everything at day and night. Just what I thought I was getting in the first place when I bought it.
What was the secret cure? Simple, just plug it into live power vs. battery. If you have an outlet nearby this is easy to do by plugging in the charging cable that comes with camera. When plugged into battery charger you will see an "infinity symbol" like a side-wise figure 8 when you check battery status using the app. When you see that the camera is working off live power and the batter just in charging mode.
So I am a happy camper now but just sharing this experience with any others that might have this same problem. I did not get any acknowledgement from Google customer service that this is a general issue but find it hard to believe that others are not experiencing the same problem. Please take time to reply here if you DO or DO NOT have the same issue so others will know if this is a systemic problem or single-unit issue.
P.s.- Google, thank you for keeping the thread open long enough to take enough replies so everyone can see how broad this problem is.
