Floaters during night vision/false alerts

Hi. Every night I get many alerts and when I view them, I see white things flying across the screen. I initially thought it was a bug or spider crawling on the camera but after repeatedly checking it, I didn’t see any bugs near it. Is anyone else experiencing this? I turned the sensitivity down some but it’s still picking it up. It’s up on my fireplace mantle so I thought dust particles since I don’t clean up there often so I cleaned it and it’s still happening.

trim.17E391C6-E511-4C8D-8DE0-4CBA76999ECA.mov (3.54 MB)

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My front porch camera had a LOT of those. I assumed it was bugs. I have no light on the front porch. Annoying since I really want the notifications in the event there’s actually someone on my front porch. The camera on my back deck doesn’t get those at all and there’s a night light there that I would think would draw bugs.

Same here and it looks exactly the same. I still assume they are bugs. Potentially attracted by the infrared light? I turned sensitivity down to 1 on all my cameras but I can’t really make out a difference in triggering the recording. The area covered by the bugs are just too big and if AWS can’t tell the distance between the object and the camera it can only deduce from the area of pixels changing at a certain speed. So, shadows, leaves, etc. are fine. Something flying in front of the camera at the size of 1/16 or 1/32 of the total field of view will trigger it no matter what.

What makes you think that they are not bugs?

I don’t think they’re bugs because I don’t have bugs flying all around the inside of my house lol. I do have an occasional spider so I did go downstairs to check one day but there was no spider (or other bug) in sight. I don’t have house plants so no gnats. I guess mosquitos are starting to come out but I haven’t been bitten. No idea what others bugs could be flying around.

Re: Dust vs Bugs

Dust shows up with straight edges. Bugs show up with wing beats.

Remember that when the camera is in IR mode, it has very little light to work with, so the “shutter speed” is very slow. On v1 cams it is probably the full 1/10 second for the frame, on v2 it may be shorter? So what you are seeing is a “long exposure” where what you see in the frame is not an “instant in time” like you would get with a flash camera. This is why the streaks can sometimes appear to be translucent.

Here is a bug - the “humps” are the wings beating mutiple times during the exposure.

Following are dust particles - Note the straight edges, it is just floating very close past the lens.

Thanks for the information. From your analysis, I guess it’s dust. Maybe I didn’t do a great job at cleaning. I will make sure to clean the entire mantle again tonight and the picture frame above it and see if it helps. Thanks! I may also move it further away from the vent since that may increase dust in the air.

If you enter “dust” into the Search at the top left of this page (if you are using a PC browser), you will find many other reports.

Every house with people living in it has dust. Some have more than others, but just because you see these doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t clean.

Here’s one: https://www.wyzecam.com/forums/topic/any-guesses/#post-64843

Oh thanks. I didn’t even think to search dust. Still, cleaning/dusting more often may help reduce the amount of dust and subsequent motion alerts so I’m going to try to stay on top of that. Thanks again for your help. :slight_smile:

I tell my granddaughtes that they’re fairies.

 

I get the same problem as well, very annoying!~

Ive had my v3 cam for about 2 months. A few weeks ago, I started getting motion alerts when a group of 3 small white orbs were appearing on my IR near night view. They usually float in a V pattern. It happened once in a while, maybe twice a week. Two days ago, it was happening every minute, so my cam plus has captured every minute of the floaters and doesn’t alert me when animals are in view. Highly annoying. I think it’s something to do with the magnets in the camera.