I have four of these contact sensors installed at home. Three hold their juice nicely, and I only need to change their batteries once every 6 months or so. One of them is problematic recently, and its battery has now drained after a measly two months. Interestingly, it is the one closest to the hub (about 4 meters from it, with direct line of sight) and is installed on a balcony door that is very rarely opened. So theoretically, this should have been the most battery-efficient sensor of the four…
One thing to note is that the problematic sensor suddenly fell of the grid (wouldn’t connect to the hub) some months ago, despite a full battery and a few resets. I discovered this 2 months ago, and finally managed to reconnect it by adding a driver called “zigbee contact mc.” I then also changed the battery again.
When looking at how these sensors are configured in the advanced SmartThings dashboard (Samsung account), I noticed a discrepancy: The three good sensors do not have a driver associated with them (the field is simply blank), and the one good sensor has that driver called “zigbee contact mc” (which I forgot what repository I got it from…). I attach below screenshots of the good vs. bad sensor dashboard view.
Any ideas on how to solve the battery drain problem, and perhaps also the related driver issue?
Also, when you see “Mc” as part of a custom edge driver name, it almost always means that the author was Mariano Colmenarejo as those are his initials. He is a very active community developer and his edge drivers are very popular.
In this specific case, searching the quick browse list for “sensors” would turn up the following author thread, so you can ask questions about that edge driver there:
As far as why some of your sensors have a blank driver name, that’s very mysterious, as they should not work at all if that’s the case. That most typically means that the pairing failed. So I don’t know what’s going on there.
Thanks @JDRoberts. I’ve read a bit on the Mariano Colmenarejo driver and it seems it could be configured to lower the frequency of temperature reports. I gave it a try and will see if that improves battery life.
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As far as why some of your sensors have a blank driver name, that’s very mysterious, as they should not work at all if that’s the case. That most typically means that the pairing failed. So I don’t know what’s going on there.
I checked this in the mobile app, and a driver is shown there for these sensors. It looks like a generic, legacy SmartThings driver that was probably in place since I installed these sensors a few years ago (but the vesion shows that it somehow got updated last month):
Stock drivers get updated automatically for all SmartThings customers, most typically when the hub’s firmware is updated, but it can happen at other times as well.
As far as how not to use the custom edge driver, that’s pretty simple. But it will probably require removing the sensor from your account and re-adding it. And that will probably break any automations using it. So it can be an annoying process, but not complex.
Once you remove the device from your account, you will need to unsubscribe to the driver in the author’s channel and delete it from your hub.
Once the custom edge driver is removed, re-add the device and it should automatically pick up the stock edge driver at that point. Then rebuild any automations that used it.
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JKnight
(Keeping SmartThings limping along since 2013.)
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I have a mix of contact sensors, quite a few of them are these, and the battery drain issue hits some of all of them, regardless of type/variety.
The extreme battery drain issue has been well documented for quite some time, and from my experience, has nothing to do with what driver is in use… I have tried them all.
The SmartThings folks just aren’t quiet smart enough to go back and revert whatever feature enhancement/change injected the battery drain issue on their end.
In the meantime, to save money on batteries, I have reverted to using rechargeable batteries on the impacted contact and moisture sensors. This unfortunately means changing the batteries about 6 times more frequently as opposed to about 3 times as frequently with regular batteries ($) on the impacted sensors. When compared to the 1.5 year life I got when these were working correctly and with my sensors that are still working correctly, I am stuck changing batteries every 10 to 30 days on the impacted sensors.
Once you remove the device from your account, you will need to unsubscribe to the driver in the author’s channel and delete it from your hub.
Once the custom edge driver is removed, re-add the device and it should automatically pick up the stock edge driver at that point. Then rebuild any automations that used it.
The original intention of the edge driver design was that fingerprints would not have to match, the device could match based on capabilities. But I know that hasn’t worked out exactly the way they wanted it to.
