Utilitech/Everspring Siren - excessive battery drain

[Spooky_pitboss]

I have a Utilitech/Everspring indoor siren, model # TSE07-1. When I got it for my Iris setup, it worked great, but regularly ate all four C batteries every month and a half or so. I never really had the time to figure out why, so I just kept spending money on batteries. Now with ST, it still seems to do the same thing, and it literally never gets used since we almost never have the alarm triggered. It’s indoors, and roughly 10ft from the hub.

I searched to see if there’s a device handler for it, but couldn’t find one that helps with battery drain or anymore settings I can change. I also don’t need the annoying low battery beep, which happens in the middle of the night frequently. Real fun when it’s 3am, and you have to get out a step ladder and unscrew it to remove it from the wall.

Anyone else experience this, or know how to improve it?

[johnconstantelo]

@Spooky_pitboss

Anyone else experience this, or know how to improve it?

I have 2 of these, and battery drain has never been an issue and I’ve had these for years. I would have thought that when you paired it with ST that it would have reset any config parameter that could be causing battery reporting to be excessive thus draining it faster than normal, but that doesn’t sound like it did anything. I suspect you have a faulty siren. It’s been a wile for me, but is there a long button press sequence that would factory reset these? If so, you can try that and rejoin it back to the hub.

[greg]

I agree with John. I have this device and according to my spreadsheet I’ve only replaced the batteries once in 5 years.

Maybe you have a range issue? if the device is struggling to connect it can use up batteries.

[JDRoberts]

Factory reset is a good idea, but excessive battery drain at one house when other people aren’t having the same problems with the same model is often a matter of the local mesh. What’s the closest Z wave repeater to this device?

Are you able to pair the device in place, or did you have to pair it close to the hub first ( bench pairing)?

If you had to do a bench pairing, then do a Z wave repair after you’ve put it where you want it to be and see if you get any error messages for it.

Battery operated devices which are right on the edge of their transmission range will end up sending a lot of extra messages which uses up battery life.

Or it could just be a bad device, it happens.

[Spooky_pitboss]

Thanks for the replies, I’ll try to see how to factory reset it and re-pair it. I think both with Iris and ST I paired it coose to the hub. The siren is within 10ft of the ADT ST hub, and less than that to a ZooZ z-wave plus switch.

Just so I understand, what’s the difference if I pair it close to the hub versus pair it in place? I never really understood why one is better than the other.

Thanks again for the help, this forum has been awesome transitioning from Iris to ST.

[JDRoberts]

It’s a mesh thing.

A battery powered Z wave device keeps a “neighbor table” of the addresses of its closest neighbors. Those are the ones that it will try to send its messages through. This table is built at the time that the device joins the network.

When you pair the device right next to the hub, it’s going to choose as its neighbors the devices which are close to it at that moment in time.

However, once you move it to its ultimate location, there might be other devices which would be much closer repeaters for it. In order to get the best network efficiency and the fastest message transmission, we want the battery powered device to have a neighbor table of its “true neighbors.“

Otherwise, if the neighbor table in the battery powered device is still the one that was built when it was close to the hub, then it may keep trying to reach devices which are far away, resulting in lost messages that then have to be sent again and again. These retransmissions are using up your battery life.

The zwave “repair“ utility just tells each individual device on the network to find its current true neighbors and rebuild the neighbor tables. At the same time, the hub charts some prebuilt message paths and passes those along, which also helps improve message efficiency in the future.

So it just realigns your network’s image of itself with the devices’ true physical locations.

Zwave plus devices have something called “explorer frames“ which will do this kind of update little by little overtime. But Z wave classic devices don’t all have this feature, so you can have a device which never gets its neighbor table updated. The repair utility fixes that.

How do I make sure my Z-Wave devices are routing optimally in the SmartThings...

So it’s not that one way is better than another. Sometimes you need to do a bench pairing in order for a device to exchange security keys with the hub, what is called “whisper distance.“ this is often true for Locks. But if you do a bench pairing, then after you have moved the device to its desired location, you just need to get the neighbor tables updated by running the Z wave repair.

However, if the device’s desired location is within one hop of the hub, then it’s going to have the same neighbors anyway. So the repair utility probably wouldn’t make any difference.

[Spooky_pitboss]

Thanks for the explanation, I appreciate it!

Is this of any relevance to the battery drain? It just says poll and ping frequently. Maybe that’s normal. The screenshots are side by side, could capture the whole width of the screen.