[Wireless Sensor Tags Forum] Appalling battery life

[Glyn Hughes]

Hi there,

Long time Tag user and currently have 20 Tags talking to a single Tag Manager.

I’ve just had to change 7 out of 20 batteries in my Tags due to them going out of range.

It seems to be a battery issue but I’m getting no low battery notifications simply because I have plenty of voltage left in the batteries after they fall off the radar!

Example;

[Wireless Sensor Tags]

What update interval are you using? 

Tag manager / tag communication is like a conference room. 

All tags will have to wake up to receive communication when the tag manager needs to talk to any one tag. 

Therefore, when you have 20 tags on a single tag manager, if the tag manager has to send out a lot of communication (such as search for out of range tag) it creates a cascading effect causing all tags to use more battery. 

Therefore you should remove unused tags (that is showing out of range) and keep all tags connected. 

We recommend less than 10 tags per tag manager,  to maximize communication reliability and battery life. 

[Glyn Hughes]

Thanks for the reply.

The update interval looks to be set to every 10 minutes.

But in this instance it doesn’t look to me like it is using too much battery as I am changing batteries that still have up to 3v and in any case if excess voltage was the problem I would be notified when the voltage drops to 2.55v surely?

I don’t seem to have any issues with communications reliability as everything communicates until it doesn’t.

I bought up the tag from the garage the other day that had stopped communicating only 4 hours previously while it was still showing 2.77v 63% in the software and sat it on top of the tag manager but it still wasn’t seen.

I checked the voltage of the old battery and it was 2.72v so pretty much tallied with the voltage reading of 2.77v shown in the Wireless Tag software only 4 hours previously.

Popped in a new battery and Boom! it’s seen straight away.

The tags had been running reliably since 2018 (apart from one DoA) until about a year ago and this problem seems to affect all tags which makes it look like the Tag Manager has gone deaf?

I wasn’t aware that there should be less than 10 Tags per Manager but as I said above everything has worked fine since 2018…

Thanks & kind regards,

-=Glyn=-

Sent from my iPhone

On 3 Aug 2022, at 18:22, Wireless Sensor Tags <wireless-s...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

What update interval are you using? 

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[Collin Bissett]

Just wanted to add that one of mine has recently begun acting similarly.  I have changed the battery 4 times and each time the sensor will work for about an hour and then the battery will be depleted(2.6V).  I only have two tags

[Catman]

I have had 10 tags for several years. I have found the short battery life issues to mostly revolve around cheap or bad batteries. My experience is the best batteries for longevity are Energizer. I still only get about 8 months max out of my batteries with a 30 minute update interval. All my sensor have strong signal levels, averaging -80dBm, and are running in Low Power Mode. The only way to get more battery life is to use buffering, but I cannot use buffering because some of my sensors are integrated into my home automation and I need the updates to register more often then the buffering will allow.

[John Effland]

Here's a plot of my battery life over the last 12 months, which I find totally acceptable.  All operate on ridiculously frequent 5 min updates, and all signals are above -70 dBm.

I use a variety of vendors but agree that Engergizers are probably best.  The longest lasting curve (green) is fascinating.  It's installed in my HVAC vent, so it suffers from cycles of ~100 deg F heat in the winter (heat pump) and ~45 deg F cold in the summer.  It's also just the 3rd strongest signal. 

John

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[Jackson Shaw]

I have had similar problems with battery life. I stopped buying 2032's off Amazon and only buying Energizer from Home Depot or the like. I'm 3000 miles from my cottage so simply changing a battery after a few months is a non-starter. This summer I am testing out Eve Home's "Weather" and "Energy" sensors in my cottage. I still have wireless tags side by side with them, and will continue to test until next summer to see who the winner is. There is already one significant plus that the Eve devices have: They support thread. https://www.evehome.com/en/thread What this means to me is that each Weather or Energy device will relay another device's information plus the thread network is fault-tolerant and can automagically re-route updates via another device if one is down. I've tested this extensively and it works wonderfully. No more reliance on tag distance or frequency.

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[Collin Bissett]

Thanks for sharing your experience,  I picked up a pack of energizer today and that does seem to have helped mine.