What Happens To Your Nest Camera When The Power Goes Out?
A pair of extra eyes is always a plus if you want to keep your family and property safe. If you don't mind paying for security, the Nest Camera system by Google is a good option you can use to secure your property. It's a smart, security system from Google that consists of a $99 wired indoor cam, a $179 outdoor/indoor cam, and a $279 outdoor cam with floodlights. These cameras also have advanced features such as strong battery life, customized smart notifications, as well as HDR and night vision capabilities so even the smallest details will not escape you.
As convenient as they sound, they may not always be completely reliable. What happens in cases where there are blackouts? Does your Nest Camera still work? Let's look at whether the Nest cam is a device you can bet on through power outages and blackouts, and how you can restore power if it goes offline.
Do Nest Cams still operate even when there is no power?
Nest Cameras are battery-operated and work by uploading video footage into cloud-based storage, which you can access through an app on your mobile phone or computer. If your camera loses power due to a power outage or is unplugged, the security camera will still record and store events for up to an hour in its memory bank. Once power is restored, you'll be able to access it again. However, this only works if you have a fully-powered backup battery (via Google).
A look at Google's Nest Community forums shows that homeowners and business owners experience issues reconnecting their Nest cams after the power goes out. In most cases, fixing these problems is easy, and troubleshooting methods could be as simple as rebooting the device. However, visitors on this forum point out that in most cases they need to have physical access to the device, which may not be always possible if they want to get it back online remotely. This could defeat the purpose of having a security camera in the first place if users are away on vacation and no one is home to fix it.
How do you restore power to the Google Nest Cam?
If your Nest camera is disconnected, there are a few things you can do to bring it back online. Keep in mind that many of these troubleshooting steps cannot be done remotely and need the device to be on-hand. The first course of action is to check if your camera is powered off or disconnected (via Google). Here's how:
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Check to see if the camera light is off or blinking yellow. If this happens, your camera may be off or have trouble connecting to the internet.
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Look through your camera's viewing history to see instances when the camera went offline. You should note that if your camera is switched to event recording mode, recording gaps are normal because the camera only turns on if motion is detected.
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Restart your router and modem.
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If your device is still offline, reboot your Nest cam, and check if your video stream comes back online.
Lack of internet could also be a possible reason why your Nest cam is offline. You can also check to see if other smart devices you own are offline. In that case, the problem could be with your internet service provider rather than your camera. Internet bandwidth could affect reconnection as well, particularly if you have too many devices crowding your network. If you think that's the issue, simply turn off the other devices connected to the internet and check if your camera is working.