Indoor 2K cameras going offline

Queries
1

Last week I bought five Indoor Cam 2Ks to replace my Wyze system. Setup was fairly easy but now I have an issue with cameras randomly going offline for no apparent reason. Of the five, I have at least one or two going offline every day and they will not come back online unless I power cycle them. It is not one camera in particular, all of them seem to be affected. Random cameras at random times. None of them are very far from the router (Asus ZenWifi XT-8) and there is good signal strength in all locations. I have tried tweaking the router to no avail, tried changing channels on the 2.4ghz band and nothing has worked. I did notice that even though the Eufy app reports the camera offline, I can still see it connected to the router. Everything has the latest firmware updates.

This is very disappointing for a security camera system. I did not have this issue with my old Wyze cams.

I also added the Wired Doorbell 2K Pro which is working well and so far does not seem to have this offline issue.

Any fixes at all for this?

2

Same issues with my indoorcamā€¦:angry:

3

yep same with min just now. Just used it for the first time and it stopped working along with the entire home base and other camerasā€¦ just quit and cant connect to home base

Super disappointed

4

This problem needs specific analysis, please contact support@eufylife.com

5

I did contact Eufy support and got the standard response. Reboot, reset etc. etc. otherwise send it in for replacement. Iā€™ve tried all that and since itā€™s multiple cameras, I doubt they are all physically defective.

Having said that, I did continue working with my router and I might have found a solution. I am using the Asus ZenWifi XT-8 which is a mesh system with a router and one node. I have read that these cameras sometimes have trouble re-connecting if power or internet gets dropped, so I was wondering if they were disconnecting when/if the mesh system was switching them over from router to node or whatever. I went into the routerā€™s settings and added all five cameras to the ā€œRoaming Blockā€ list which is supposed to prevent roaming between nodes. So far, theyā€™ve been rock solid for three days.

For others with similar issues, what kind of router are you running? Mesh?

1 Like
6

@Chronocentric thanks for your detailed analysis. I do use Netgear Orbi Mesh and it doesnā€™t drop the connectivity. Not sure if my router works different than yours or it may not be related to mesh system.

7

Thanks for the comment, mine is Asus which is known to be buggy. They probably handle roaming differently. If my cameras remain solid for the next few days, Iā€™m going to turn off the Roaming Block List to see if the offline behavior returns. Iā€™ll report back here either way.

2 Likes
8

Fritzbox and a apple tv

9

So someone with Eufy support knows a workaround, but I had to find it on Reddit. My Eufy IndoorCams would not be ā€œofflineā€ since the app shows that status if you unplug power to the cameras. The app would see them, but not be able to access themā€¦giving a (-3) error.

I found a thread on Reddit where an Asus XT8 user oulined a workaround that Eufy support provided (by phone, sounds like):

"Solved this with customer service today finally:

  • Needed to turn on Smart Connect in the admin at router.asus.com

  • Problem is the Eufys (and my other devices) had issues connecting using WiFi 6, so I needed to create a guest network for my 2.4GHz devices (which doesnā€™t have WiFi 6)

  • Named the network the same as my previous 2.4GHz one

This solved everything!"

This didnā€™t quite work for me, however. Since thereā€™s the suggestion that WiFi 6 incompatibility is the problem, I first tried turning that off for my existing network. I could briefly access the cameras after the router reset, but just turning on Asus Smart Connect and turning off WiFi 6 did not solve the problem. I had to create the new guest network. Adding this guest network for just the Eufy IndoorCams fixed the problem. So I went back and tried to set my main network to WiFi 6, and the connection issue came right back. So Iā€™ve had to do the steps above AND turn WiFi 6 off for both networks. I found no useful information here, so I thought Iā€™d add this to an old thread.

10

I could be wrong, but I have a hunch whatā€™s going on here. I suspect that the ā€œSmart Connectā€ moniker refers to whatā€™s called ā€œband steeringā€ more generically. That is, the router maintains networks on both the 2.4-GHz and 5.0-GHz frequency bands, with all connection credentials set up the same for both (i.e. SSID, password, type of security). The router then monitors the signal strength of each wireless client, and under certain conditions, the router determines that a given client would probably have a better connection on the other band than the one the device is presently connected to. So the router sends a signal to the client to switch to the other band, and the router facilitates this transition. When it works, itā€™s pretty neat.

Just one problem: Devices which are not capable of connecting on both bands. In most cases, these will be devices that support 2.4-GHz Wifi only, and cannot use 5.0-GHz Wifi. (You guessed it, Eufy Cams are examples of these.) If the router doesnā€™t know this, and the right conditions happen, then the router will, in effect, boot the 2.4-GHz-only device off the network, expecting it to appear in a band that it cannot actually reach.

The solution to this problem is to prevent the router from trying to band-steer wireless clients that are limited to only one band. Basically, there are two ways to do this; eitherā€¦

(1) Explicitly inform the router of each specific device that should never be band-steered, using the routerā€™s admin interface; or

(2) Create a ā€œguestā€ or ā€œvirtualā€ SSID that is 2.4-GHz only, and have the problem devices sign on to that SSID. Because there is no counterpart 5-GHz network with the same SSID, band-steering canā€™t happen for those devices.

If youā€™re inclined to choose option #2, I would discourage folks from simply giving their existing 2.4-GHz and 5.0-GHz networks entirely different SSIDs, because this will stop all band-steering, even for those multi-band devices which can benefit from it. Instead, leave the main network(s) with the same SSID, and create a different, additional SSID that runs exclusively on the 2.4-GHz band; then, configure 2.4-only devices to connect to that network.

Hope this helps.