Yale Connexis Battery indication

[Abhay_Joshi]

Hi, I have recently installed Z wave module 2 in the Yale Connexis L1 lock. and connected it to Samsung Smartthing version 2 . All has gone well except that I noticed that the battery indication on the Smarthings app for the lock shows 1 %. When I installed 2 days back it was showing 20%. On my Yale app it shows about 2 bars which is somewhere between 25-50%.
Usually if the battery is that low the lock itself will indicate every time we lock or unlock it. But this has not happened. Any suggestions?
Thanks
Abhay

[giskeimel (Gisele Keimel)]

Hi @Abhay_Joshi!
Try to reset your lock (see lock manual), some of the z-wave modules have an issue and stop reporting battery levels. Reset helps.

Just for your information the 1% isn’t reported by the lock, the lock would report 0xFF likely which is then shown as 1% by the DTH. See this posts for more details:

Battery reporting, still a problem in 2018

Good write up. Let me try to add a few points from how ST and the DTH’s work with some devices. If you have a Z-Wave device as per the specs it defines two alerts before the battery dies. First one is low battery and other one is critical battery (depends on type of device). Now comes the tricky part: The specs don’t define what is low battery and what is critical battery. Some devices report low battery as 30% others as 10%. Same for critical battery. So what ST does is by default in most handlers when it receives a low or critical battery it sets the level to 1%. So if you see a device showing 1% it’s not because the battery is at 1% it’s because it sent a low or critical battery alert and the DTH set it to 1%. If you have custom DTH then those may do a better job of defining how it h…

Yale Deadbolt BL1 Battery Percentage at 1% at Randon

That would indicate the battery likely needs to be changed. What type of battery are you using, alkaline or rechargeables? Depending on the quality of the battery/chemistry the voltage can fluctuate based on the load on the battery. E.g. if the deadbolt is moving, the motor draws a large current which can temporarily cause the battery voltage to drop and if it’s below the threshold it could even cause the lock to shutdown totally. One the load reduces, the battery voltage recovers and its reports a higher % (but the capacity is still diminished). This it more pronounced in not so great quality batteries and rechargeable batteries like NiCD or NiMH. So to be safe, when you see if it’s better to change the battery. Alkaline’s or Lithium 1.5v are the best.

I hope this information is useful for you to understand how is working!
Gisele.

[Abhay_Joshi]

Thanks Gisele. Really appreciate that. I am just worried that by reseting the lock I may have to recreat all the keys again which means that I may have to use the keys from the leftover credit keys.

Thanks & Regards
Abhay