I know there are other threads on cameras randomly powering off (NOT going offline, but actually powering off). There are threads back to 2022 at least probably further. I’ve been having this issue more and more recently, this is with v2, v3, wireless, pan, etc cameras. When it happens it is normally all of my cameras, not just one or two. I originally thought it may be one of the people I have it shared with, but as I found more and more threads on this I believe it is more likely a bug somewhere in wyze.
Regardless…
I’d like to find a good way to just power them back on. For now I have an automation rule that runs once a day that just powers on all cameras first thing in the morning. This seems to work fine so far, but I’m still not thrilled with the work around since cameras could be off for 23 hrs if they somehow get turned off shortly after that runs.
I’d much rather have this run with something more like:
if “any” camera in group turned off
do turn on camera
Automation doesn’t appear to allow this though unless I’m missing something, so the only other option is a scheduled task to act on the whole camera group to turn the cameras on at a specific time like I’ve done, Due to the randomness of cameras getting powered off I really don’t want to create 24 or these manually to turn it on once an hour, but that may be where I go!
Does anybody else have a better work around for this issue?
First of all, the cameras are not powering off - the camera has no ability to do that by itself. I assume what you are talking about is setting it’s operating mode to off (what you do if turn it off from the app). This does not power off the camera, it simply sets it to an off mode where it does not do much, but DOES continue to be powered on, connected to the WiFi, and the CPU is operating. All of those are required in order to be able to turn it back on.
FWIW, out of my almost 50 operating Wyze cameras dating back to 2018, I have never had a camera turn itself off without me doing it accidentally.
With that said, sure, you can create automations to turn your cameras on as often as you want.
There is no ability to query a camera to see if it’s on or off and take an action based on that query.
I can’t rule out that one of the people I’ve shared it with is accidently doing it, but on a single camera it isn’t easy to turn them off. I know you can accidently turn off the whole group easily, but as far as I recall I’m the only one with it setup in a group like this out of the 3 of us that have access, but I’ll definately revisit it with both other people it is shared with. I think, at a minimum, it is a poor UI design to let you power off camears with a miss “click” and no prompt. I’d also love to see where those that you share them with can be limited with what they have access to. This issue for me has cropped up a lot in the last 6 months, but in the previous 5 or more years since v1 cameras I hadn’t had it (with the camears being shared with the same ppl).
For now I’ll just use the work around with an automation to power them back up at least once a day.
I haven’t toyed with the guest accounts in a long time but from what I recall, when you add the cams to a group, everyone now sees them in the group.
Nearly all the settings are “shared” amongst accounts, including notification settings etc.
It can get quite confusing as if you create an automation, the other accounts can’t see it, but it affects them. Then they can create one that conflicts, which you can’t see and things start acting all wonky. The guest account feature really needs a lot of work.
I’d suspect one of your guest users is shutting off the group to try and disable notifications (or maybe just doing it by accident or thinking they’re supposed to do that when they’re done). I’d communicate to them all that they should not be changing anything, turning cameras off, changing notifications, etc, only viewing the feed.
You can create an automation to power them on every hour or something, but that’s still not a perfect solution, better to find the root cause, which I suspect is one of the other users.
