Both of my SmartThings motion sensors display 75% battery level even when replacing batteries for new.
I have been using one for over 6 months and the other is about 3 weeks old, in which time I have not seen the battery percentage change.
Has anyone else had this?
it’s normal.
Hi Eric,
Sorry I don’t understand, why would reporting the incorrect battery levels be the expected behaviour.
I also see devices battery levels jump up and down and the battery missing from the device screen on the app with a cloud icon and a line through it.
battery voltages DO change all the time, jumping up and down, a little bit or a lot, influenced mostly by temperature, load and flaws. A carefully designed device firmware can make it seem the battery level is steady. Now you see for yourself, it is not actually steady. Likewise the reported level of what is maximum/100% or 75% is up to the firmware. New batteries don’t have to be 100%.
Also devices may have discrete reporting levels with nothing available in-between those levels. The available levels vary by device.
for IDE I don’t know.
looks normal to me for the past 5 years.
I had the same with my brand new motion sensor. Within a couple of days it dropped from 100% to 75% and has since stayed there. I havent looked at the logs in the IDE but might do when I get time.
It does look like the update in June broke the battery reporting for Samsungs own devices.
I do however understand the fluctuation under load, but found it weird how the fluctuation was between the same 2 levels.
I get that this is normal for what people are used to but not sure that makes it right.
If we rely on these for security I would need reliable battery reporting so I can ensure they are always active.
I agree and the issues have been present for years.
Now I don’t rely on phone app battery reporting because of the issues, instead using smartapp “Simple Device Viewer” which can monitor all batteries sorted by level, and last-reported-event. That’s a regular check once a week. Like walktest of security system, requires maintenance. If something goes AWOL then you will know.
Unfortunately I think recently there is a new issue that SDV report indicated that unexpected devices went active even though they didn’t have actual activity (I’m pretty sure they were off/dead). It made me think that administrative activity in the cloud caused an update in this SDV report. Not good for my maintenance procedure above.
