The electricity at my house went out last week while I was out of town. After it's back up and wifi is reconnected, my dropcam failed to recognize the network and reconnect itself. As a result, it was offline for the rest of the time when I was out of town. Coincidentally a couple other houses on my street reported break-in's and I had no way of knowing if my house was okay. I feel like Dropcam should be able to handle situations like this and reconnect itself and network is detected again?
Hi there,
Dropcam is designed to search for and connect to it's associated network any time the power or internet goes out. Any time that the camera is not connected to it's network it will be actively searching for that network.
In almost all normal circumstances, the camera is able to find and connect to it's network with no problems. However, there may be times, particularly after a power outage, power surge, or an internet problem when the router may not reconnect properly with some devices. When this happens, a restart of the router or camera may be needed in order for the router to re-establish it's connection.
Best regards,
Is there a way to force dropcam to physically cycle power without being at the location? The problem with this fix, is that when we discover the problem, we are often hours or days away from the device. Can we configure the dropcam to do a soft power reset every 24 hours or 12 hours to automatically handle scenarios like this?
With other security solutions there is onboard storage via sd card, etc. With dropcam its all cloud or nothing. I need a device I can trust. If other devices were capable of re-connecting to the network and dropcam was not there is a problem with dropcam.
Hi Richard,
Currently there is no way to force a reboot or re-connect the camera from a remote location.
I have, however spoken to a few other people who have found themselves in similar situation. What they have done is gotten an electrical timer that they can plug the camera into, which will cut the power for a few seconds every day on a set schedule, allowing the camera to be rebooted every day just in situation like this comes up.
Best regards,
If I wanted to build my own solution, i would do so with a cheaper webcam, a timer as you suggested, and backing up files to s3 on a rolling basis. I paid a premium for dropcam because it offers a solution to a problem instead of simply being a tool. Currently your solution does not work as advertised. I had to wait until after i had an event leaving my home unprotected and monitored for days to discover this product gap.
Based on your response it sounds like this is a known issue as enough people have had to work around the problem manually for you to be aware of this solution. Is dropcam preparing to add this information to marketing material and owners guides? Is dropcam planning on including electrical timers with future products?
Does dropcam have an officially recommended electrical timer?
Hi Richard,
It's not at all a common or "known" issue. It's a situation that a very small number of people have run into. One of the purposes behind an electrical timer is the fact that sometimes when routers stop connecting to a specific device, one or both of those devices may need to be rebooted. As such, when people leave devices connected to Wi-Fi for long periods of time in remote locations they sometimes use electrical timers to make sure that everything is rebooted often.
We do not have any particular electrical timer that we recommend. We will also not be selling anything like that.