In order for your Blink Mini to function correctly at least three different pieces of kit need to be working in harmony- camera, app and your router. If you live in a larger house your connection to the Internet might not be via the router itself but via a WiFi extender, which adds a fourth piece of equipment to the mix!
If any of these don’t work it might seem that it is your Mini camera that has lost connection.
The three main signs that your Blink Mini isn’t connected to WIFI?
[1] Red LED light
If you are close to your camera, then the first sign that you will see which suggests that your Mini has lost connection to the Internet, is that a red light is displayed on the left hand side of the lens
[2] “Camera offline” on the thumbnail
But what about if you are away from home and trying to connect to your Blink camera remotely?
The app provides you with a couple of messages. Firstly, that your Blink Mini on the homepage of the app, that the camera’s thumbnail has a “camera” offline message.
[3] Camera offline on support page
If that wasn’t enough, when you tap on the camera icon on the thumbnail you get sent to a camera offline support page as can be seen in the image above.
Six reasons that Blink Mini not connecting to WIFI
[1] Wrong password
One of the most common reasons that your Blink Mini can’t connect to your wifi is because you have typed in the wrong password.
Let’s face it, strong passwords are a complicated combination of letters, numbers and characters which are difficult enough to type in accurately on our laptops.
Trying to type these passwords in our phones is that much harder because the keyboard is much smaller and then we only see the letter for a fraction of a letter before it disappears.
Look at my hurried attempt to type my WIFI password on my phone in the video above
Do you see how complicated this can be?
[2] WiFi isn’t working
The next common reason that Blink Minis won’t connect to the Wifi is that the Wifi network isn’t working.
It isn’t just your camera that isn’t connected but every other device as well!
Fortunately there is a quick way to check this on your phone.
Go into the WIFI settings on your phone and look for the name of your WIFI.
Your WIFI should be highlighted and on my Android phone it will also include a “tap to share password” link.
This means that your phone is connected to your router and that it has a live connection to the Internet.
As you can see below.
[3] Router set to 5 Ghz
The next fairly common reason when it comes to the Mini’s connection to the wi-fi is that your router is set to 5 Ghz and not 2.4 Ghz. Modern routers can broadcast a signal on two different frequencies- 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz. 5 Ghz is the newer frequency which allows for faster WIFI speeds.
Because it is the faster of the two frequencies and because most of our devices will connect to a 5 Ghz frequency, some people set their router to only broadcast at 5 Ghz.
Unfortunately, Blink Cameras can only connect to the 2.4 GHz frequency and not 5 Ghz.
Changing the settings on your router will only take a few minutes but it does vary depending on the router you have.
But it involves the same 5 basic steps
- Connecting to your router
- Signing in
- Enabling 2.4 Ghz frequency
- Saving settings
- Logging out
My WIFI is provided by Virgin and so they make their own hubs.
[4] Poor/weak signal
Next up in our search for connection issues I will talk about a weak signal causing the connection issues for your Blink camera.
This most likely happens when you have placed your camera too far away from the router.
You have two choices when it comes to solving this issue- one easy, one hard.
The easy one is to move the camera closer to the router where the signal is stronger and the connection better.
The more difficult solution is to buy yourself a WiFi extender which allows you to boost the signal strength of your router and keep your camera where it is.
[5] Update Blink App
The last but one reason for any connection troubles that your Mini might be experiencing is because the Blink Home Monitoring app might need to be updated.
This is another easy and quick thing to check for.
I have created a short video of how I would check this on my Android phone.
See 23 second video in photos on Thursday 13th April
Just open the Play Store, select “manage apps and device.” Under updates available select see details. A list of apps that need to be updated will be displayed. Scroll through to see if your Blink app is on the list. If it is, select update and wait for the update to download. Now open your app and see if the update has fixed any problems and allowed your Blink Mini to connect to the WiFi.
[6] The Blink Servers are “down”
Our final reason that your camera might not be connecting to the Internet is that the Blink Servers are down.
When your Blink device connects to the Internet it connects to the Blink servers which help to make your Mini work.
Your camera needs to connect to these servers even if you don’t have a subscription to the Blink cloud storage.
To all intents and purposes everything at your end is working perfectly- your WIFI, app and camera are all behaving themselves but if the Blink servers are down then it will appear as if your camera isn’t connected to the WIFI.
There isn’t any guaranteed way of knowing when these servers aren’t working.
You will receive a notification in your app if your camera has been disconnected for over 30 minutes but this isn’t a specific message about the Blink servers but about connection issues in general.
Another way that you might check is to use the link below to check to see if any other Blink customers are reporting that they are having trouble connecting to the servers.
Blink Security down? Current problems and outages | Downdetector