The Arlo Security Lights can be a useful addition to an Arlo security camera system but they
might not be the best option for you. We’ve been testing them out and here’s what we
found.
The Arlo Security Lights are battery powered, it’s the same batteries that power Arlo
security cameras, and they contain their own motion sensors down here under the LED light.
That means you can use them independent of Arlo cameras to form a stand-alone motion-sensitive
lighting system. But if you want outdoor security lights then there are better and cheaper options.
The real strength of the lights comes when they interact with your Arlo cameras. If you’ve
ever used If This Then That to automate tasks then you’ll find the programming process
to be very similar.
Here’s how it works.
Once you have the
lights pair with your account, they’ll appear in the
Arlo app here, under your camera feeds. Those buttons on the right will switch them on and
off manually but we want to program them so we need to create a new mode.
Do that under the mode menu.
Let’s add a mode, call it My mode, and then select the camera we want to use with it.
…..
So you can get the camera and lights to trigger each other. Because they have their own motion
sensors, you’re effectively expanding the area under detection. You could, for example,
have a light at the far end of a path to provide night time lighting. Perhaps your camera doesn’t
usually trigger until someone gets closer to your house, but now you can set it to start
recording as soon as that movement is detected further away.
Each Arlo Light produces 400 lumens of light. That’s a little brighter than the battery-powered
lights in the competing Ring range, but nowhere near the illumination you’ll get with a
conventional hard-wired security light. So if you need wide, bright illumination than
that might still be a better option.
Or, if you want an all-in-one camera and light, consider a hardwired unit like the Ring Floodlight
Cam at 1,800 lumens or the Maximus Camera Floodlight at 2,400 lumens.
In addition to the motion sensing, the lights can be switched on manually through the app,
but you can't set them to come on at a pre-programmed time. Although as they are battery powered,
you’ll want them on as little as possible.
One fun little feature is that you can program the color of the light between millions of
colors on a color wheel, and you can even set them to flash on and off or cycle between
three different colors.
To help save energy, the lights communicate over Bluetooth Low Energy. That’s good,
but what’s bad is that the Arlo base station you’ll have if you own Arlo cameras doesn’t
have that built in. It means that whether you have an Arlo system or not, you need to
use a bridge unit to interface the lights with WiFi. Each bridge supports four lights
and it does help conserve power, but it’s another piece of kit to sit in an outlet in
your wall.
They’re IP65 rated so should be fine outdoors and will work from -14 to 113 Fahrenheit,
that’s minus 10 to 45 Celsius), there’s a standard ½ inch screw mount but not the
magnetic mount used in Arlo cameras.
So, I think the lights are a good addition to an Arlo camera system, they provide some
extra light during nighttime and expand the cameras detection area. It’s great they
can trigger each other.
It would be better if the lights worked with the existing Arlo base station, rather than
requiring their own bridge, but at least the bridge is included in the purchase price of
every kit.
As stand-alone lights, they do a sufficient job, but if you’re not going to use them
with Arlo cameras you'd likely be better off buying standard home security lights. They’ll
be much brighter even if they can’t send alerts to your smartphone.