Snow and rain are tripping off motion detection alarm on cameras

Hi, I just bought the 8ch NVR with the 410 PoE cameras. It started snowing last night and since then I have been getting bombarded with motion alarms. I attempted to lower the sensitivity of the camera to see if it would fix the issue but havent found the sweetspot yet. Also a note on sensitivity, seems that settings don't stick. I set sensitivity on my mobile client and saved it and then after some time went back in and noticed it was set back to 10 (default). I will try setting sensitivity from the NVR directly next.

Any suggestions, motion alarm is basically useless if its detecting rain/snow, I am basically ignoring the alarms at this point because of the several hundred I have got.

Thanks.

Tdusek,

Welcome to the forum and Reolink products in general. These are some of the best cameras and support team is super helpful.

Not the answer you are looking for, and you can read in the product manuals (section copied below), weather for an outdoor camera is very difficult if not impossible to correct for when talking about motion alarms. This is compounded when the device is set to night vision because of the more grey tone, everything moving sets off an alert. I have this issue mostly with spiders creating webs across the camera's view even on clear nights. Spiders are my worst enemy.

I do not use alerts except for internal cameras where the conditions are more regular or stable. I do have motion setup for recording to the NVR, but not for email alerts, etc. Even in some of these situations, insects, dust, or other objects that float into view often look large to the camera and trigger an event even with sensitivity set the lowest.

Page 25 of the manual says this relating to weather events.

"Weather" The weather conditions are going to affect your motion detection. Dramatic weather phenomenon such as heavy rain, strong winds, lightning and so on, may trigger the motion detection with surprising frequency. On the other hand, things like fog, mist and other obscuring kinds of weather might mask or obscure something moving to the point that the Camera fails to detect them. Here are a few steps you can take to minimise the amount of noise in your images.

• Try adjusting the Image Settings to fine-tune the brightness and contrast to get a more stable image.

• Limit the motion sensitive area to only the areas in view that a target could be.

In particular, large featureless areas in the camera’s view are the ones most likely to give false triggers - turning off the motion sensitivity to any area a target cannot move in front of will help reduce false triggers.

Ok thanks Quella for your informative and quick response! Sounds like the alarms feature will not be usefull then for the outdoor cameras. I have already set up with the mask tool under motion settings to detect and alarm only in specific areas of the field of vision and not the entire area. Doesn't sound like much more I can do then.

Thanks again.

Based on your specific use case, you can also schedule alerts to only happen when you want and not for the entire 24hrs; if not needed. Again this will not stop weather from impacting the camera (as well as all other IP cameras), but it will limit the number and times you get alerts. I have in the past also disabled it during said events and re-enabled it when the weather passed. More for critical monitoring locations.

Oliver

Person, vehicle and pet smart detection are working as I can see from the email subject but how the hell can I simply suppress any motion (only) detection notification emails which flood my mail box on rain or snow?
RLC-823A, newest firmware v3.1.0.989_22051911_v1.0.0.30,
alarm setting 24h set to minimum sensivity (= 1),
only smart detection sensivity of persons, vehicle, cats to about 75,
object sizes set but only relevant for smart detection which has no issues.

user_623346741346376

This is still not resolved. My RLC-511WA with latest firmware update, erroneously detects snow fall as motion and alerts every few minutes. Clearly, the motion detection software is not smart enough.