Doorbell camera constantly sends motion alerts

There may be a few flying insect in the vicinity.  Is the sensor really THAT sensitive to pick up moths and the like?  No other vents or heat sources.  Seems like it needs an update to make it not quite as sensitive.

@PatrickGSR94​ If a bug got close enough to your Video Doorbell, it could trigger the camera to wake up and begin recording.

@cwilson6​ Do you only notice this happen during the night, or does it happen at all hours of the day? The Video Doorbell's Activity Zones only work in full light, so once it gets dark out and night vision turns on Activity Zones will not be blocked. 

And as Davey previously mentioned, the Video Doorbell's motion sensor works by picking up sources of heat that move around it. If a small bug or animal could get close to the doorbell's motion sensor, or if there is a vent near it, that could trigger the camera to record. I would look around your doorbell and see if there's anything that generates heat near it. If there isn't, it can help to reset the doorbell by pressing and holding the button on the back for 30 seconds. Once you release it, you will be prompted to set the doorbell up again in the mobile app.

I am having the exact same issue. This is happening on a doorbell that is a new (refurbished) support replacement from Simplisafe. It is in the exact same mount and location of a SS doorbell that has worked for several years without issue. There are no heat sources or motion nearby at all.

1. It happens every 5-20 minutes, both day and night, at the same interval.

2. It happens the same at every sensitivity levels.

3. I've hard reset the doorbell camera twice by pressing the button, going through setup, removing and re-adding the camera.

The old SS doorbell camera didn't exhibit any issue, only the replacement unit, again, mounted in the exact same bracket.

@Ambival​ Understood! Knowing this, this is something our engineering team would want to look into further. I've forwarded your case details to them for additional investigation.

@emily_s​ Great. I look forward to hearing from them. At the moment, I've been forced to disable all motion detection and alerts - two prime use cases. Today, I will be shipping back my previous doorbell camera that gave up the ghost last week.

@ducare​ No, I have never heard anything from support and still have alerts nonstop day and night - in the same mount where I had no problems for years.

I've had to disable all alerts, really negating most of the doorbell's value.

That is exactly like our situation! Still waiting to hear back from Simplisafe...

It is not a heat source issue as the previous SS camera in the same mount had no such issues!

Interesting. It's very frustrating as I know basically ignore every notification and have no idea when there is truly someone there. The doorbell is almost pointless at this point. Very frustrating!

No. This seems to be a very common problem, but I've heard nothing. As this has been a constant problem with replacements, I don't have any confidence anorher will fix it.

Good question. Mine has been no use for ages and I've had to turn all notifications off for the exact reason you've cited. It is the same for many others in this group, sadly SS has yet to respond.

@alenah ​ our dev team is working on improvements to the Video Doorbell, but unfortunately I'm not able to give details just yet. Please keep an eye out on the Community and we'll update when we can.

@alenah ​ same exact thing that’s been happening to me since the last update. It catches all the cars, but the people. Like you, I miss the important alerts because I’m trying to ignore the false alarms. We need a fix and we need it quick! 

Same here - I turned it off for now, but what I don't understand, is why Simplisafe is not responding to these messages! I have tried calling them and it is impossible. The chat is awful as well as they take a while to respond. I am seriously considering through it all away and going with a different vendor. 

I am having the same issue. Have reconnected, done updates, greyed out areas, lowered sensitivity - yet it still sends me an alert every time a car passes by. I get alerts every few minutes. I would be fine with getting notified when someone presses the button only.

@thematthewwr​ in your case, it might help to disable motion on the Video Doorbell entirely. You can find that setting in the SimpliSafe app under My System > Camera Settings > your Video Doorbell Pro > Motion Detection.

@davey_d​ but that defeats the entire purpose of having a camera with alerts. We don't want alerts for cars, or flags, or squirrels. We want alerts for people. 

@davey_d is this issue being actively debugged? Being a developer myself I realize estimating a timeline for a problem without the solution isn’t really ideal or realistically measurable, but if not actively being worked on, how far down the queue is it?

@missshorty1401​ About four months ago, I replace my old one in the same mount. The old one had died, but the new one spams alerts every 5-10 minutes, even without any heat source, movement, etc. Others here are getting slammed with alerts even when all zones are disabled.

This really has to be fixed. It's now just a doorbell with all events turned off.

@missshorty1401​ Updated that even setting on Low, on web and in-app, I still get false alerts, just at a lower rate. On Medium, cars pull up right to camera in the driveway and pass constantly, yet those are ignored on "all motions" settings, and alerts get filled up with footage with nothing at all happening, even in shadow or on the edge of vision.

The camera firmware is fundamentally broken and has been for nearly 6 months now. (p.s., functionality we've been paying monthly for that whole time)

My old one worked well until it stopped one day. The replacement one in the exact same mount sends alerts non-stop and has done for many months now. Would love to hear about some progress from SS and an ETA We've been very patient 

@tomygunn301​ Interesting. I wonder if it is these and with the dead zone marking not working from the app as well, leaving everything misconfigured. Will check it out on my end!

Update: My app was at Medium, but the Web site showed High as well. I've changed it online and will report back if it makes a difference. Good catch!

Update 2: The next two alerts were legitimate cars, and then the spam started coming again. I've checked again online and I'm still set up as Medium. It was a good catch though!

It doesn't change the issue with "ignored" regions that you are not supposed to get alerts for. 

@tomygunn301​ you are a genius! I went to my online dashboard and also discovered the setting was different then my app. I changed it to low on the web dashboard, then refreshed the app and now the app said medium. So i set the app to low also, double checked both sides (web and ios app) and now everything says low motion settings. It stopped picking up cars driving by and I couldn’t be more excited. Been running successfully now for 24hrs. @davey_d please take a look at this discovery and let your devs know the app (ios in my case) isn’t syncing all the correct data.

@tomygunn301​ As a dev, it makes me wonder if they changed some attribute names when they broke out the sensitivity settings into day and night (app) from a single one (web). Online still might be 'sensitivity' and the app might have 'sensitivityDay' and 'sensitivityNight', and the two apps never aligned. This would explain why one never seems to affect the other.

Of course, there's no way I can tell, or how precedence is calculated. A thought. 

@janic3w86​ That's interesting. Do you happen to know which version of the firmware you're running now?

Looks like v2.6.2.171

@janic3w86​ Ah, the same version I'm running too with the spam. Unless they've made changes elsewhere...

@danniemiche​ This has been an issue since last year with no response from Simplisafe other than ""we're looking at it".

Had the same problem described here. Went to the online web app, moved sensitivity to “medium”, and the alerts decreased. There is definitely a disconnect between the phone app and the web app. 

In all of my cases, I can get them to decrease in volume, but the ones that appear still have no motion in them and are just as useless, just less noisy. For eight months, I've been stuck with all notifications disabled and 20-25 timeline events a day with nothing in them.

This has been going on for eight months with nothing from Simplisafe. Any basic dev could have solved this problem with enough training data (assuming they have) in a matter of weeks. I suspect there is a fundament hardware rev error that is going unacknowledged (on top of the broken configuration interfaces).