I got my first sensors a few days ago… a couple of Aqara temp sensors. I got them added into HA using ZHA. After a few days I am noticing the battery life is literally draining about 7% per day. I assume it is cause its checking in to take readings too often. The temp sensor is sitting 4 feet from my zigbee coordinator antenna so it should not be related to stressed communication problems.
My questions are:
Can someone walk me thru how to change the config of the temp sensors to slow down the frequency of temp reporting
Suggest any other possible reason its draining so fast and what I might need to look at to fix…
My guess is it’s the battery. I’ve seen new devices apparently decline rapidly in the first few days and then level off to a trickle.
I must have had a good batch of temp sensors, all mine report 90%+ after months of use, but I have seen the quick fall off then plateau behavior with other Aqara devices.
I don’t think there is any way to change the reporting behavior. When I looked at the logs, they seem to report in routinely on an hourly basis, and on changes in environment. There seems to be some threshold on when to report off-cycle, ie: a 0.1 degree change may not get reported immediately, but a full degree probably would.
I have had several for a couple of years that are still over 80%. One that it outside under cover is at 32%, but I’m assuming that’s due to cold nights and/or weak connection.
I’ve found Aqara sensors are not great at finding the closest signal. If you paired them with the hub and moved them close to a router, comms will still be with the hub. Did you pair with it near the co-ordinator, or in a another room, in which case it might be pairing with a router. I would do the pairing again, and maybe buy a new battery to rule out a dud batch.
I’m using the deCONZ/Phoscon add-on rather than ZHA, but from there you can just re-pair it and the add-on realises it’s the same physical device and keeps the same entity_id etc. ZHA is possibly the same (I have no experience with it), but it might be safer to remove it first.
But HA is not “checking in to take readings” because Zigbee is no pull mechanism).
It’s the device itself reporting back any state or battery state change to the coordinator (push)
A battery drain of 7% sounds like there either is an issue with the device itself or it’s too far away from the next router or your coordinator.