Hi i have an ikea shortcut button that eats batteries literally. tow weeks ago it went down to a new battery every 5 days , a week ago it went down to 2 days .
i put an fully charged battery in yesterday and today its flat as a pancake.
so last week i setup a sonoff ZigBee hub with tasmota on it and connected one ikea shortcut button i have two , changed the battery in both 1 connected to smartthings hub and the other sonoff /tasmota ZigBee hub and two days later the one connected to the smartthings hub was flat the other connected to the sonoff/tasmota ZigBee hub is still showing 100 percent , they are exactly the same distance away from the hubs roughly 11 feet . Any help would be great before i pull out the remainder of my hair. .
Thanks
Martin
It’s a known issue that has now been going on for almost 2 years with various IKEA devices when connected to hubs other than their own. It has nothing to do with smartthings, people report the same problem on hubs of other brands. But not all people, not all devices, and not even necessarily all the time.
The best hypothesis I’ve seen is that there is a routing issue with these devices where when they go through a slightly incompatible repeater they end up doing Long polling instead of short polling, which then uses up battery life like crazy.
If that’s what it is, then the problem could be triggered by a specific repeater, which is why you might have two different devices even connected to the same hub and one shows the problem and one doesn’t.
It’s incredibly annoying, but it’s been going on for long enough that it doesn’t feel like anybody’s going to come up with a real solution soon except to keep trying different combinations of devices.
Ultimately, the solution may be to use the IKEA battery powered devices with their own hub and bring that hub in through matter, but that’s probably a year off at least.
There are several existing threads in the forum already on this, I’m surprised you didn’t find any of those, but in any case that’s what’s probably happening.
Some people have said that one DTH was better than another or one edge driver was better than another, but my own guess is that they just ended up in a slightly different routing pattern the second time and that was what was relevant, not the driver being used.
I previously had my Ikea on/off dimmer, 5-button remote, and shortcut buttons connected to Home Assistant with a TI CC2652P coordinator using zigbee2mqtt and feeding them back into Hubitat; that setup ate batteries like crazy and is what motivated me to buy a SmartThings hub.
Since moving those buttons to SmartThings with Edge drivers, I’ve not had any battery issues.
I have a large number of repeaters around the house (Ikea outlets, Ikea smart bulbs, Sonoff S31 zb lite outlets); I can only assume that’s why ive been fortunate to not have the battery issues many others suffer from.
I recently purchased a Sonoff EFR32MG21 based Zigbee 3.0 coordinator (uses the same chip as Home Assistant Yellow and the new Ikea hub and referred to as ZBDongle-E) to use with ZHA on HA for more testing.
I found a post recently on the HA forum where someone seemingly found a trick to apparently resolve the problem, at least with the ZBDongle-E. I’ll see if i can find it when i get on my laptop later; it had to do with routing as @JDRoberts mentioned.
I’ve stopped buying the Ikea button devices and now buy Third Reality smart buttons. @csstup has updated a driver to work with them and it works great.
Please do not take the advice to throw out your shortcut buttons.
I was also getting 1 to 2 weeks from my batteries but I am now getting 1 to 2 months.
So, what am I doing differently?
1). I use premium batteries (no more Ikea batteries)
2). I switched to Edge drivers (I asked somebody on Reddit how he got battery life)
Thisiswhytheinternetexists → Ikea Shortcut Button
3). When re-pairing the button after fitting a new battery, I do so from its operating location.
I do the latter on a hunch related to @JDRoberts note about possible routing issues.
I notice that new batteries are reported as 50% with the above Edge driver but did not want to find fault.
1 to 2 months is absolutely terrible battery performance for Ikea buttons though and I’ve had plenty last that long and then be drained in a few hours.
I’ve got a couple sitting around at the moment that have been OK for weeks, if not months. However one of them lasted a couple of days prior to that. That’s the problem. They can work for a day, a few days, weeks or even months but at any point something can change and they’ll drain in hours.
At 1 to 2 weeks life, I stopped putting batteries in them and let them gather dust.
1 to 2 months may not be ideal but lets my wife use them to toggle kitchen lights so I will settle for that while I wait for a solution.
My two Z-Wave thermostats (2 * premium AAA batteries each) are supposed to last for 1 to 2 years, but I settle for 6 months plus. I will see how my Edge drivers (in place for ~ 2 months) change that.
Precisely, and so do the IKEA buttons normally. Mine were well already used back in March 2021 when I first got hit by the problem. That was some introduction to the hub beta firmware …
It required having the most recent firmware on the Ikea device and making a change to the ZHA configuration YAML file so that end devices cannot directly connect to the coordinator.
We don’t have that level of access on ST.
