Hi I’ve had Wyze OG cameras for a few years and decided to upgrade two of them to the Camera v4. I updated the firmware to the latest (4.52.9.3415) changed over all the settings and set the detection area, and put them in the same spot as the old ones. The problem I’m having is that the motion detection triggers constantly starting at dusk. I live on a busy street and while I would occasionally get false positives with the OG cameras, the v4s detect motion constantly. As far as I can tell, it’s detecting the light when a car passes by (or even if their headlights shine on my yard from a block away).
I tried reducing the sensitivity to 10% and reducing the detection area to the absolute minimum area I could, but it still detects motion whenever a larger vehicle drives by and it misses motion in the daytime (like a car that pulled into my driveway, or the mail arriving).
Other info that might be relevant: cameras are inside and aimed out a window. IR, spotlight, and camera light are all off. Night vision set at Dark. I have SD cards set to continuous recording, but no subscription services.
Are there any other options I can try to fix this? With so many false positives it basically becomes unusable to actually detect motion. I had 100+ wyze notifications today, and 6 of them were actual motion.
Yup, car headlights set it off constantly. The OG originally had this issue and they released a firmware update to have it ignore light better, which helped a lot. Not sure why they didn’t apply that same logic to the v4. I have my notifications shut off at dusk and turn back on at dawn (which I did anyway). Playing with the sensitivity and detection zone helped some, but I live right near an intersection so when cars turn, the headlights wash through the detection zone. If yours are just going straight down the street you may be able to eliminate enough from the detection zone to reduce the false alerts.
FYI, I talked to customer service and their only solution was to buy Cam Plus. $20 a year to fix a $25 camera that doesn’t work as well as a $20 camera from the same manufacturer. I am quite disappointed since I had an overall positive experience with my OG Wyze cameras. I was hoping customer service would at least an acknowledge 100+ notifications a day is unintended behavior on a brand new camera, but apparently that is expected and there are no plans to fix it.
After further pushback, they did offer a $10 gift card and they would send a report along to an engineer. I can only cynically conclude that fixing false positives would reduce subscription sales and is unlikely to be a priority for their engineering team. Regardless, they offered no timelines or assurances it would be fixed, and my partner will not tolerate another week of 100+ notifications a day, so I am going to replace these with cameras from another manufacturer.