Random times my Ring Pro does not alert me properly

I’m having problems with my Ring Pro. I’ve purchased it a while back after my front door was kicked in while I was home a couple years ago after not answering my door.

I’ve not been getting a lot of motion alerts in the last 2 months or more. I designate an area of the wall and ground, my Ring is on the side wall of an enclosed porch, as my active zone. Sometimes I get alerts when I get a package left on my porch. Sometimes I get alerts when a cat walks up to my sidewalk and porch.

Other times I get a package without any alerts. They clearly have to cross my zone to deliver. I walk out the front door to pick it up and go back in. Sometimes I get the motion alert right away, sometimes it’s delayed, and sometimes I don’t get any indication.

I quickly pick up my phone and load the app and check my status and the network status, it’s all green, power is good and wifi is green (I got 180/10 Mbit internet) and it’s about 20’ and through 2 walls to my router.

What led me to post this today is, I just went outside to put something near my front garage door, and walking out and then walking back in never triggered anything. I checked my phone and it had a motion alert, but my Chime never alerted me. I opened the app to check my Chime health, and it’s green. I clicked a few test sound Chime tones and all sounded good.

I have sensitivity all the way down to Less Motion (I’ve even set it to People Only mode and even clouds and a cat triggered it too). And I’ve recently gotten motion alerts when the clouds rapidly covered the sun and caused the hard shadows to blur and dim. So low sensitivity is not a problem since clouds can activate it. Plus I’ve received numerous alerts from the windy shadows of my tree in the wall and a cat that comes by in the morning and sometimes in the dark of night.

I feel I cannot depend on my Ring camera to protect my porch anymore. Is there anything I can do? Update the camera or change a setting? I’m at my wits end with my Ring Pro.

Hey @MrTom. Thank you for taking the time to detail your concern here, I greatly appreciate that. Do you mind showing me what your Motion Zones look like in the app? In addition, we can see if a reset helps with the motion detection on the device, as it seems to be the concern from it not picking you up. For the reset, you will press and hold down the setup button for 30 seconds, and then go into the Device Health section for the Pro and tap on Reconnect/Change Wifi Network. This will walk you through another setup, so make sure your settings are how they should be when you’re done. From there, test out the device and ensure it is capturing you coming and going for me, and let me know what those Motion Zones are if you’re still having troubles. Happy to help. :slight_smile:

Well, I haven’t tried a reset yet, I don’t know where the setup button is in the app.

It failed twice today to alert me of packages left on my porch. And both times it did nothing while I walked out to pick them up.

But it did alert me twice on 6/24/20 @ 2am and 8pm of a cat that keeps walking up to my porch. Also last week I got 2 notifications within one hour at night due to a vertical spider web in the middle of the camera and the IR LED illuminating it while the wind blew it around. Really? One strand of a blowing spider web at night can trigger it (with sensitivity all the way down), but someone walking directly into the motion zone left or right does not?

I provided a snapshot of my motion zone. I keep it down low because when I drive my car into the garage at night it creates a lens flare from the headlights in the center of the camera causing a false alarm. Plus I keep it away from the wall near the tree because when the sun creates a shadow on the wall and the wind blows my tree, I get a false alarms.

I really wish you made an IR sensitive motion sensor instead of analyzing pixels for movement. That way trees could blow and move right in front of the camera and not trigger a false alarm. And clouds covering the shadows on the wall would not trigger it either. But a small mouse walking to my door would.

You guys really want to be top dog in motion sensors? Make an IR motion Ring Doorbell. Your slogan could be, “No more false alarms!”

Hey @MrTom, happy to step in for Chelsea here! I appreciate you sharing that screenshot of your Motion Zones and letting us know why you have them drawn that way. Ultimately, the reason you’re not getting consistent motion alerts when there are visitors at your door is due to the way you have your Motion Zone drawn. The zone is only on the ground and a very small portion of the screen, so it will not be reliable in detecting visitors.

I’d recommend drawing multiple Motion Zones, and covering more of your front porch area with them. Please ensure that the zones do not overlap, as this can also impact the motion detection. I know you mentioned that you would occasionally get false alerts when you had larger Motion Zones drawn, however, this change would result in the motion detection more accurately picking up people at your door.

You mention that the zone I have created is too small. But yet I get multiple alerts when a CAT walks in that small area to the bottom right. I also had to remove a small vertical spider web that was in the center of the camera because it alerted me twice within around an hour. And that was the very small part to the left side of the zone. Come on, one spider web blowing in the breeze at the least sensitive setting.

Why can a cat trigger my motion, but a larger person does not? Like I said before, a larger person can walk from the right side to set down a package on my porch. I then open my door and walk from the left all the way to the right at the edge of the porch and pick up my package and walk all the way back inside. And I don’t get any motion notification, but yet a smaller zone area picks up a cat.

I used to have the zone larger and tried the people-only mode, but that’s a joke. I seems like there’s no special “people-only” algorithm that knows when only a human walks by. I got motion alerts on a camera lens flare from the headlights of a car that was outside the zone. My People-Only mode setting lasted only a day or two.

Oh, and that small zone area is totally enough space to recognize a person, since I do get motion alerts when the clouds quickly covered the sun. So you’re saying the problem is me and how I have it set up, and not the algorithm? I just did a Google search for “best doorbell camera with motion sensor”, and the results were Arlo Video Doorbell published May 2020. Hmmm.

Here’s 2 more images. One of the cat and one of my car’s headlight moving on the ground activating the motion alert.

@MrTom With the way your Motion Zone is currently configured, the Doorbell may struggle with accurately detecting visitors at your door. Creating multiple Motion Zones to cover a larger area of your front door will likely help to capture the important events, but you may receive some unwanted motion alerts as well. People-Only Mode can work for some neighbors and not others, so I’d recommend having that toggled off if you found it did not help. With that said, I would strongly suggest giving our support team a call at one of the numbers availablehere. They can take a closer look at your individual device and provide more detailed and advanced troubleshooting steps to help you find a working solution for your motion detection concerns. We’re taking additional steps to protect our team and help reduce the spread of COVID-19, so this has resulted in longer than normal wait times. If you are outside of the US, please read our response to COVID-19here to see how to contact support.

So here’s what happened. On 9/13/20 to 9/14/20 I’ve received 162 motion alerts.

Oh ya, did I mention all those 162 alerts were from a spider web?

I’ve had spider webs alert me in the past, but this one’s the whopper! One hundred and sixty two motion alerts, I’ve counted them. From 10:30pm to 7:30am.

Really, one strand of a spider web floating in the wind, and I get 162 alerts?

And this one, are just 3 of the 162 alerts I received.

Do you want me to post all 162 videos somewhere? I could. Or do you want me to chop them all up into video framerates and post every single JPG picture? I could.

EDIT: Oh, I just recently tried People Only mode again, didn’t work. The cat and headlights triggered the motion again.

My Ring Pro isn’t so “Pro”, is it?