Sorry to bring up a much talked about topic but still need help.
My V3 attracts the nighttime gnats but I noticed something different.
Many say to turn off the IR lights but that doesn’t help. When I have had the bugs, I have not only turned off the IR lights but even the camera itself. Nothing is on. I come back a few hours later and turn the camera back on. The bugs never left, the swarm is still there. It’s not as if they come back a minute or so, they never left.
And more surprising that even at 30*F, they r there. Assumed cold weather would have stopped this but hasn’t.
I’m suspecting that they are attracted to the magnetic field that the camera emits. But even when completely off?
I must state that the floodlight camera gets it the worst. The lights are NOT ever on. I have turned them off completely. My deck camera (no lights) gets it occasionally and the IR lights are on. But even with IR off they do not leave.
I tried a dryer sheet and that didn’t work. Any suggestions?
Powered off or off via the app? I’d you turn a camera off via app it is still powered, just enough to be able to receive the on command to turn all the functions back on.
Yes, in fact someone did measurements a while back and in the so-called “off” state the cameras were using the same amount of power. Everything is still on.
I don’t think bugs are generally attracted to magnetic fields. Might be the heat?
This is the first post I’ve seen with this complaint. My own bug problems went away when I disabled the IR lights.
I will say this - even if they were truly powered down, by the time the camera is booted and able to show images to you, any factors of heating and lighting and EM would already be back in effect…
For your floodlight issue, try switching it to PIR instead of camera motion. You can also use filter by PIR in the cams event recording settingd
Yes, everything being accessed by the app.
I believe it to be the heat that you mentioned. I tried a few experiments tonight. I have two cameras very close to each other. One has IR lights on and the other does not. It only has NIGHT VISION on.
The IR camera has swarms of gnats flying around it but the NIGHT camera has none…or so I thought.
As soon as I turn on IR lights on the NIGHT camera, the swarm is there. This is instantaneous. There is no delay between IR and No IR when you click on it in the app.
When I turn OFF the IR the bugs instantly “disappear” from the picture. It’s not as if they’ve moved away. They are still there you just cannot see them in NIGHT VISION ONLY mode.
And again, the NIGHT camera is using the IR light from the other camera.
So what I think you’ve actually established is that the darn bugs are there, all the time, around us and our homes. We only notice when they fly in our mouths or are illuminated appropriately.
It’s not even the heat, necessarily. They’re just buzzing about. When hit dead on by a light, they reflect back to that camera’s lens.
Like @Customer stated, it’s not the ir lights themselves, it’s just the light source that is directly next to the lens that is very much illuminating whatever is directly in front of the lens very brightly. If you turn off the IR lights then use a flashlight and put it right next to the camera facing the direction the lens is looking, that will illuminate anything directly in front of the camera the same way as well, bugs, dust, particles etc. Having your illumination off access like from a nearby light or a nearby camera that has its illuminators enabled will help for the target camera not to show the particles directly in front of the camera.
Kind of interesting really. All this time I also thought the IR lights were attracting the bugs. Turns out I turned off the IR lights for the right result but for the wrong reason. (The desired result was dropping tons of extraneous motion detections and notifications.)