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If you are using an outdoor camera you may receive false alerts at night generated by rain, snow, insects, or spider webs. This is caused by the infrared (IR) illumination of your outdoor camera, which is what gives it night vision. 

Rain and snow will reflect the IR light, causing a very obvious movement in the view of your camera. 

Many insects are attracted to IR light as much as to visible light and this makes in front of your camera a great place for spiders to build their webs. 

The easiest method to reduce false alerts particularly from rain, is to place cameras under an eave, awning or some other cover. This means that the rain is further away from the camera lens, which does reduce the number of alerts. For some buildings and locations, placing a camera in such a position may not be achievable.

(Note: don't forget to select the 'facing outside' function in 'fine tune smart detection', it is designed to handle outdoor monitoring.)

 

The most effective way to deal with rain, snow and even insects and spiders is to use infrared floodlights to provide to night vision illumination. Note you need an IR floodlight with a wavelength of 850nm.

You can set up your infrared floodlight to face the same direction as your outdoor camera (but fixed 1 to 2 meters away from the camera) and then use tape, or something more permanent and aesthetically pleasing, to cover over the LED's on the front of the cameras, leaving the light sensor untaped (see pictures below). This lets the camera switch into night vision mode automatically when it gets dark enough, but use the infrared light from the floodlight. 

As the infrared floodlight is shining from a slightly different angle to the camera, the light bounce from rain and snow is greatly reduced. Insects, and the spiders that set up webs to catch them, are also draw to the standalone infrared light bank and so reducing the build up of webs which can cause alerts if not cleaned away.

We are working on a better solution than taping off the camera LED's, and will add it to this page when it is added to the CleverLoop app.