Ive read a lot on the forum regarding this and I know the battery reporting of the devices is to say the least not the best. But I was wondering if anyone knows of a fix for this battery problem.
Had a fairly new sensor stated it was battery low (25) , so I replaced it with a new one and it still reported the same battery level as before it was replaced.
So I thought I would swap over batteries from the same type and age of sensor to see what happened. Basically nothing the battery from the other sensor reported the same amount as the previous battery (25) , yet the other way round what was a new battery reported fairly high (67) in the other sensor. Doesn’t look to be the battery ( to a point of course)
I then checked the firmware on both sensors and they are the same and report the same in the IDE etc.
My thought is I could chuck new battery after new battery at this sensor and its never going to report above 25 … Any ideas ?
All other sensors new and old seems to report ok (well putting aside the gen 1 motion sensors that report any level they feel like)
It’s less of a problem as much as it is a limitation of battery tech, there’s not much you can do about it. Most of us just wait until the first failure of a given sensor - see what that battery report was when it failed and then setup notifications before it hits that.
Pretty much.
I’m leaning toward that sounds pretty typical operation - not faulty.
Batteries don’t report on my desired schedule, I’ve noticed they don’t care what I want.
Can’t tell what device you have, but I have a solution for Zooz 4-in-1 gen1 (2xAAA-NiMH) which is a bit messy but has been working fine (better than 2xAAA) for about 4-5 months,
I dremel’ed and wire-clippered clearance in the plastic battery housing for 1x RCR2, and ran a jumper to make the battery contact work, and it’s been reading 100% and updating all capabilities for those 4-5 months.
It does appear to me the battery monitoring profile is bad for 2xNiMH but fine for RCR2 - lifetime has been good enough that I won’t know for sure, for a long while yet.
If I can guess you have one of the SmartSense/SmartThings motion sensor. Their battery reporting is terrible for a long time.
My motion or multi sensors report 1% for ages (months). The only way to tell when have to change battery is when it goes dead. The fairly new “battery is less than 15%” notifications are indeed annoying with those devices.
Otherwise IKEA motion sensors, or dimmers tend to go flat without any notice. One day they are 60%, next they they not even light up the LED inside the device.
what do you do for a full list of battery reports? I assume when classic-phone-app is killed, that smart-app SimpleDeviceViewer will be unavailable, so battery and last-activity will no longer be easily summarized. I’m not counting on the author to update for API.
I was thinking about a new ActionTiles dashboard with just battery%, but it would not tell me last-activity-date.
These changes are increasing my labor on a hobby that is supposed to be fun and useful.
Thanks for the replies. I use RBoys Low batter monitor which works well in the new app. Its a gen 3 motion sensor which I seen much better battery life and reporting from that the original gen 1 , which is why I thought its a faulty sensor as none of my other gen 3 motion sensors have this problem,
Though I have two instances, one named per my original “SimpleDeviceViewer”, and a second grouped as “Setup not complete”/ “Simple Device Viewer” . I should probably delete the second, but that seems like shooting in the dark for no purpose, since I don’t have a known problem with its existence.
