Who’s planning to submit an idea for the SmartThings Innovation Challenge?
Propose a new feature or ways to enrich an existing SmartThings feature → Share Your Idea Here
Develop a new driver that enhances user’s abilities and the overall SmartThings experience → Share Your Idea Here
Why should you participate in the SmartThings Innovation Challenge?
Visibility: Gain visibility for your innovative ideas within Samsung, SmartThings, and our partner ecosystem
Community: Connect with fellow innovators
Support: Potentially secure resources to bring your ideas to life
The best part?The winners take home a Samsung 55” Frame TV!
For more challenge details, check out this post on The SmartThings Blog
JKnight
(Keeping SmartThings limping along since 2013.)
4
Well, I think this forum is a laundry list of things that desperately need fixing ahead of any added innovations, which seem to usually break the things that are working lately.
For me, fixing the battery drain issue would be a number 1 priority. We are going on a few years now and it hasn’t recieved much attention, if any. I don’t think that it plagues everyone, so that may be why it hasn’t been fixed. For me, on my battery powered devices, I previously got 1.75 to 3 years from a battery… the past few years I am lucky to get 10 to 25 days from a battery. Chasing offline device’s to replace batteries has become a daily activity for me as I arrive home each afternoon, and has me questioning my life choices back when SmartThings was actually a viable smart home solution.
Sure, I could move on to something more reliable, but I am heavily invested in SmartThings (for many years) and have my entire family (kids, teens, wife, elderly parents in their late 80s) trained at this point. Everyone knows the most important part of any smart home is keeping the wife happy! So, I am not sure which is more painful, switching to a viable smart home solution at this point or continuing to wait for the SmartThings team to get their head out of the sand.
That is probably enough for my rant. I won’t be submitting this or any other ideas, just to have them ignored.
I’ve only had one device that had a battery drain issue like you mention. It was one of the original ST’s motion sensors that came with my v2 hub. It just started burning through batteries. I finally just replaced it with another sensor, a Ring motion sensor. Haven’t touched the batteries since. In fact, I only have a few high use contact sensors that I replace with any real frequency. I have a ton of battery driven devices, tilt wands for my blinds - those I replace about every 3-4 months, but I also use rechargeable AA’s in those so the life will be a bit less. I swapped out my Nest x Yale door locks and put in Yale Assure 2’s with ZWave, about every 3-4 months with those as well, the Nest version was every month. I do appreciate that there is now a battery level warning on the favorites page, instead of getting a last minute warning before the device just dies. Anyway, not to negate your post, just not having the same issue in my environment and I’m currently sitting at 275 devices.
1 Like
JKnight
(Keeping SmartThings limping along since 2013.)
6
You’re very lucky, or should consider yourself very lucky.
I have about 130 devices, and every battery powered device experiences the dreaded battery drain issue.
I have deleted and re-added devices. Tried more expensive batteries, cheap batteries, rechargeable batteries, wiring up AA batteries, all with little difference.
My rechargeable 123 batteries actually last a few day longer than the SureFire, Duracell, or Energizer 123 batteries in all of my water leak sensors… but a few days longer is maybe 15 days total… where I previously would get 2 years out of a SureFire 123 battery in the water leak sensors.
Interestingly, and I have reported this previously, the farther a battery powered device is from the hub or a repeater, the longer the batteries last, but none last longer than about 30 days.
I am glad you aren’t experiencing what I am experiencing, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Lol!
What devices? I have quite a lot of battery powered devices and the batteries last up to two years.
JKnight
(Keeping SmartThings limping along since 2013.)
8
Not sure how inovating a solution to the battery drain issues might be off topic here, but feel free to move the conversation to any of the following threads as I am very interested in how you and others might have overcome the issues:
Wow, that just sounds awful. Is there anything environmental that might be causing signal loss that would force the devices to do a lot of repeats tx or searching? I essentially live in a big Faraday cage. My walls are over 1’ thick and there is a lot of wire mesh involved. I have to use a lot of repeaters (both ZWave and Zigbee) to get my entire house covered. Just spitballing here, have you always been on the same hub? I started out with a v2 and am now running on a v3 with a secondary v3. I also repurposed my old v2 to run STHM and SLGA. Anyway, I wish you luck trying to get that under control, it must be frustrating.
1 Like
JKnight
(Keeping SmartThings limping along since 2013.)
10
Nothing environmental has changed on my end since early 2017 (same hardwired network connection to the v2 hub, same wifi access points, same house, same internet provider, same wireless device congestion in the neighborhood, same battery powered device locations, etc.), I believe a hub update introduced the battery drain issues a year or two ago.
To me, batteries are an added failure point (as they always fail when you need them the most), not to mention environmentally bad and costly/kWh. While not always practical, for all applications, I’ve selected very few of my ST devices to be battery powered and as such I’ve minimized these issues. It takes some looking for line or USB powered ST devices, but I have found them for most ST applications and am using wired sensors instead of using batteries. Thus, I can spend my battery replacement efforts with those batteries that I can’t get around and have all failed this year (Car, UPS, Roomba, smoke alarm backup-but line powered, TV remotes, etc.).
