How To Fix UniFi AI Pro Enhancer Spotlight Not Turning On

I recently added the UniFi AI Pro Enhancer to an AI Pro camera and ran into a confusing issue: motion events and alarms were registering correctly in UniFi Protect, but the Enhancer spotlight would not turn on at night.

At first, it looked like either a bad accessory or a Protect bug. It turned out to be a switch port configuration issue.

The symptoms

My setup:

• UniFi AI Pro camera
• AI Pro Enhancer
• UniFi Pro Max 16 PoE switch
• Camera connected to a PoE++ port

The camera itself worked fine. Protect was registering motion events and Alarm Manager triggers, but the spotlight would not activate.

The biggest clue came from the Protect logs.

Protect initially showed the device as AI Pro + Enhancer, but later it would only show as AI Pro. That suggested the camera was losing or reinitializing the Enhancer accessory connection.

Things I tried first

Before finding the fix, I tried the obvious steps:

• Confirmed the AI Pro was on the latest firmware
• Re-seated and twist-locked the Enhancer several times
• Moved the camera from a UNVR Instant PoE to dedicated PoE++
• Confirmed motion and alarm events were registering
• Tried motion-based spotlight settings
• Tried Alarm Manager / smart detection triggers
• Looked for a manual spotlight control in Protect

None of that fixed it. The Enhancer was still intermittently attaching/detaching.

The fix

What finally resolved it was manually configuring the switch port connected to the AI Pro.

In UniFi Network, I changed the camera’s switch port settings to:

• PoE: Manual → PoE++
• Link Speed: Manual → 1 Gbps FDX
• Spanning Tree Protocol: Disabled

After applying those settings:

• Protect consistently showed AI Pro + Enhancer
• The repeated accessory attach/detach logs stopped
• The spotlight began triggering correctly at night
• Motion and alarm-based lighting worked as expected

My guess at what was happening

The AI Pro itself was staying online, but the Enhancer accessory connection seemed unstable. My guess is that some combination of PoE negotiation, link auto-negotiation, or STP behavior was causing the accessory to reinitialize without fully taking the camera offline.

Forcing PoE++, locking the link speed to 1 Gbps full duplex, and disabling STP on that direct camera port stabilized the connection.

Hopefully this saves someone else from assuming they have a bad Enhancer.