Motion Sensitivity picking up pets when set for People Only

Ring must be waiting for another class action lawsuit until they address customer reported issues and misrepresentation of the product during the sales cycle… just saying…

Additionally, it’s clear that the community manager here is not properly escalating customer issues…

Same issue here. No matter what sensitivity settings I choose, my floodlight cam is triggering alerts for small animals in the dark 20 feet away. I had no idea I had so many midnight visitors in the garden. Four bunnies, a raccoon and a cat, all in the same night. Thing is, I only want to be awakened if a large two-legged creature enters the back yard, not whenever a possum gambols in the distance, but no matter what I do I get critter cam alerts.

Exclusion zones don’t help because the floodlight cam is 9 feet up and the night critters wander wherever they please. If they came up and mugged directly into the camera, I would forgive an alert, but I need a setting that ignores bunny butt at 20 paces.

Tbh I have got to a stage that I just ignore them now and have them on snooze! It has caused so many endless nights of disturbance.

I feel like I want to return them but I have spent so much time and effort installing these I will prob end up waiting for Ring to sort this all out!

Don’t get me started on the whole WiFi connection issue, for the price these cams should have a stronger radio band!

This is driving me mental. I too have it set to “Human Only” or whatever it’s called.
If a car drives up the driveway, it won’t set off the motion until a person gets out (good)
If a cat walks across the driveway (ring ring) I get notified What the Hell?
I have a Boston Terrier and a French Bulldog, and they both set that thing off constantly.

c’mon Ring, if you’re going to have a “Human Only” mode, please make it work.

It is soooo frustrating these cameras with the unusable software have become pointless!

I have spent weeks trying all kinds of ways to work around this and nothing works… the latest was a spider that was not even on the camera or the lens it was about a 1ft maybe away from the camera set of motion alert and i checked the footage and found the culprit - i have stopped looking for humans now when alerts go off, i tend to go into david attenborough mode :laughing:

Every time I start to think, “hey, the camera is not false alarming lately” I disciver my motion zones are turned off from the last time I didnt want it recording every activity my wife and I do in view of the camera.

12 flipping taps/steps to turn off and on, 2 motion zones. Someday I hope someone with a few brain cells to rub together figures that a kill switch right on the dashboard when you open the app to disable the camera is a good idea. Most of Ring’s customers do, I’m sure.

I did get something I wanted from this floodlight cam at least, and that is the ability to look out that end of my house when my driway alarms trigger (which do work good, only a few false alarms once in a while…NOT a Ring product) without running all the way upstairs to look out the only window that faces that way.

I also get a heads up when my parents up and decide to walk over. I had them build a house next door to me, but the downside is they and people from there walk on a trail to come over, so the driveway alarms, which only detect steel…or something like a squirrel shaking them, dont alert us. The floodlight cam does, but usually by the time I can see what it is, they are on my doorstep!

It’s a nice resolution camera that gives me the ability to look that way or see if someone comes around when I’m gone (I should say “came around”) but I cant use it as a nighttime security device…and still actually sleep without it waking me up for no good reason.

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I have the same thing happening. Pets used to never set off alarm but over the past 4 months it has. I would like to know if a fix since we have 4 cats and the motion is being set off many times a day.

My ring sensitivity has increased on its own.

Hi, I also am having the same problem with the stick up cam Elite wired. I am receiving alerts picking up cats when my motion sensitivity is set to people only. If i toggle off people only and set my sensitivity to the lowest setting available, i still receive same alerts so this setting doesnt seem to make any differnce. I have contacted Ring who initially told me that i havent a problem until i pointed out that on the Ring website it states “These PIRs are pet friendly and have settings calibrated to ignore heat sources from animals 13KG or less on medium setting”

My only option at this time is to turn of motion detection at night to save countless alerts throughout the night

I was asked to send a live video clip to Ring of my motion detection which i have and was told a Ring team leader would contact me within 24 hours. I received a email within few hours stating " glad we were able to assist you and is there anything else". A further email informing me the team is working on this issue and i will be contacted once a fix is found.

I am not confident a fix will be found as this issue has been ongoing since October 2019 or possibly before. My cameras are new so thinking of returning.

is there any firm update on a possible fix for this known and reported issue? Thanks

I wouldn’t mind if they would take a look at some of my videos to diagnose what’s going on. It’s an indoor wired camera where I’ve set the motion zones to only where they would need to be to pick up possible intruders wandering around, and although it keeps being suggested that reflective surfaces might cause problems, I just don’t think I have anything like that causing any problems. I have lots and lots and lots of video footage, several every single day, of my 10 pound cat walking across the floor, coming out from under a table, or climbing his cat tree. Occasionally one is completely baffling – like when he just cuts across a room’s corner where there isn’t a great deal of motion and not a very large portion of the motion zone changing. People mode is on, and it’s surprising how often he appears to be a person to the camera’s software. The back yard, on the other hand, a floodlight cam, seems to have improved inexplicably in no longer recording the dog next door since I tightened up the zones. He still kicks on the light, but not the camera. There appear to be different sensing rules for just the light than for the camera. I still wish he wouldn’t keep tripping the light, but I’m OK with that as long as I don’t have a long collection of dog videos too.

We had some sun come out this morning and it was showing through the road opp with house on each side of the road, so i bit like the sun shining through the a funnel and it was shining up on my drive.

The motion alerts went crazy!!! everytime somene walked passed my home on the main pavement their body caused a shadow through the sun that was reflecting on my drive, even though the person (human/people) was nowhere near my set motion zone their shadow was!! it wasnt until i watched all the motion footage i came across the common trigger a shadow of a person (human/people) refelcting through a ray of sunshine on the floor across my motion zone.

REALLY!! so we have trees, bushes, wind, boiler flu pipes, rain, spiders, cats, dogs, birds, critters/ all animals, human/people shadow reflections , ghosts and smoke. very quick in identifying these intruders but very slow in identifying real risks.

You would think i was talking about a cheap chinese knock off and then complaining :confounded:

Something has changed in the last year. I have a floodlight camera on our front driveway just before our gate. The orginal camera did just fine in picking up any vehicle/person that came into the zone i had set. After several months it stopped picking up vehicles. I tried differen/multiple zones, nothing worked. I talked to customer support on two seperate occasions and during the last conversation they suggested that they had made a change to the “algorithim” and that they would send the old “algrithim” to the camera and had me reboot the camera. Nothing changed. I even went as far as to buy a new camera and install it and nothing is any different. The camera currently can pick up squirrels, cats, and the once in a while spider, but 90% of the time it will not pick up my large p/u truck, the UPS truck or most any other vehicle that pulls up. I am not worried about people, i want to know when a vehicle pulls up to my closed, or even open gate. $500.00 and many, many hours and i can’t get the camera to recogonize when a very large object fills the screen but a 12" squireel occupying nine one hundred the screen will set it off everything!! AND i have tried every setting, zone size until i am blue in the face!!!

Well some more sunshine this morning and a whole lot more shadow alerts!! Oh yeah how can i forget the stray cat that woke me up at 1am setting off alerts (stupidly i have alerts set on my echo devices as well as my phone and several other family members phones) so not just me that got disturbed.

I feel these cameras are uselss for outdoors! i only brought them in Dec 19 so i have no idea how good they were before this time! starting to think i have wasted near enough £600.

All these great reviews and youtube videos were very misleading.

I have now contacted Ring support 3 times and each time they deny there is a problem and all my devices are working correctly. Until I point out the statement on Rings very own website about pets and PIR sensitivity control where settings are calibrated to ignore heat sources from animals approx 13KGs or less on medium setting. Ring also deny any reported problems on this forum. I received a email from Ring support 3 days ago telling me a update was sent to my devices to resolve this issue. Since then at least 1 of my devices detects nothing. You can dance in front of it and nothing! When will Ring be honest enough to admit there is an issue and concentrate on resolving the issue. Disappointing!!!

So contacted ring again and all my devices were hard re-set. The next evening exact same problem with picking up cats walking across my drive. Again contacted Ring and was advised this issue with motion detection and pets had been logged as resolved for all customers the day before? I again sent videos as requested to prove my cameras were still picking up cats and was then told only a few were still experiencing the same issue?? I am still at a point where my cameras are being turned off every evening. No further timescale was offered for this fix other than asap.

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I got so frustrated when i got to 40 alerts this morning due to the shadows of humans/people i rang RING. The lady was very sorry about this and put me on hold - she accessed the footage and was apologised as she clearly seen no human or person had walked into my motion zone but thier shadow did. She put me on hold again and came back with that they are aware of the issue with people only mode and that it is not working, she said it is being looked into and could not give a timeframe!!

So atleast someone has addmitted! unless she was just fobbing me off.

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I dont know if this will work for everyone but my floodlight cam is wired so I turned off the power to it for a minute or so and now my 80 pound dog doesnt set it off. Its like rebooting your computer when it is acting up. I also found by reducing the sensitivity my light doesnt go on as much as it was. I think everyone should try the power down trick and see if it works.

@YouStayOut wrote:

I dont know if this will work for everyone but my floodlight cam is wired so I turned off the power to it for a minute or so and now my 80 pound dog doesnt set it off. Its like rebooting your computer when it is acting up. I also found by reducing the sensitivity my light doesnt go on as much as it was. I think everyone should try the power down trick and see if it works.

I am sorry but i am sure others including myself have tried this quite a few times, i even had to go through it with support team and still nothing. Personally i do this every couple of days and also reset the whole lot of them and the wifi connections, dont ask me why as they still dont work.

They have admitted there is an issue, plain and simple the features dont work they are broke or whatever they are.

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All of these things may be true. My system behaved last night so I will be interested to see if it continues to behave or not. I will post a reply in a few days as I can test it with my med\lg dog. I do wonder though as it worked fine for the first month and a half what triggered the change. Time will tell.

Love the George Washington/Gene Simmons avatar!

My floodlight cam has been behaving better lately. Dont know if there just havent been critters or what. Still goes off and records when we back the van out of the garage…yet didnt when we drove back in to the garage…go figure.

I’ve had black plastic on my stainless topped worktable nearby, that stopped the constant triggering every time the light would come on. But I dont know what I’m going to do about that long term…paint the thing black and just keep touching it up?

Lighting and electronic sensors (or standard opticss) can be a hassle at times. Have you tried excluding the area of your table top in the motion zone? You could create more than one zone to be around your table top depending how you are set up. Vehicles set mine off since its larger than a human but I am the only one back there normally. It may be worth a try to use more than one zone so there are no more false positives.

George Simmons came to me in a hand full of change one day and has been my face ever since.