IKEA Tradfri - Batteries in the remote controls are quickly discharged

I swapped out my sonoff zigbee coordinator for a conbee ii so of course now im thinking those ikea buttons are nice and cheap - looks like im going to buy back everything i sold on ebay a few weeks ago.

Home automation is an addiction.

Proceed with caution… The IKEA buttons drain (randomly) with Conbee ii, HUSBZB, and all versions of the Smarthings Hub. So far the only way to guarantee that these buttons work is to use the IKEA hub… But the IKEA hub does not expose button events to HA via the integration so that doesn’t work either.

For some reason I thought these worked better with Conbees - might stay out of it then!

Sorry to ask a basic question here but I'm not even getting zha_events from this remote let alone think about battery drain. I'm able to pair it via a tasmotized sonoff zigbee bridge with ncp-uart-sw-6.7.8_115200 (also tried 6.7.9) and I see the device with the battery showing at 100% but when I try to listen to zha_event while pressing any of the buttons I don't get any events. Is this even supposed to work?

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Hi all! Is there any solution for the IKEA remotes battery drain? I currently have some on/off buttons and also 3 symphony dimmers integrated with ZHA and Conbee 2. Every 15 days I need to swap batteries, otherwise the remotes simply stop working, but some devices still reports the battery level and it is shown on the integrations screen. Very strange…

So far, no. If you use the IKEA Hub they work fine… BUT the IKEA Hub does NOT expose the Button Events to Home Assistant, (or any other integration) So you are left with buttons that can only be linked to IKEA devices, which limits their use.

I am replacing my IKEA Buttons with Aqara buttons (which are almost exactly the same size). And am having much better luck with them, but the Zigbee pairing is not the most intuitive.

not sure if it is the same case. When I started with IKEA symfonisk remotes it was draining batteries fast. after a month one if them oscillates around 0% but still works.
my conbee II however was operating with old firmware. I updated firmware and all returned to normal. Magically batteries went up to about 60% and remaining at this level for several weeks.

I hope in my case it was old Conbee firmware.

It seems that ZigBee 2 mqtt has this issue solved, but I migrated everything to ZHA to reduce one point of failure, and now seems that I need to rollback in my decision. Is soo difficult to port the fix?

I have the exact same experience. With zigbee2mqtt my battery lasted for months without an issue. I migrated last week to ZHA and I thought something went wrong because after 2 days the buttons did not response anymore. Turned out that the batteries of all 3 of my IKEA buttons were empty…

Oh and I changed from a CC2531 to a cc2652P, no idea if that makes a difference. Maybe I can do a test, with the old stick and the new one, both on ZHA. For some reason I also do not see the battery status of the buttons now. I only see a battery and a ? question mark.

I’ve got another ikea shortcut button and after about 5 days its showing 100% charge. This is Conbee II and ZHA.

This is in contast to when i had a tasmota sonoff hub - would have drained by now.

I know at least one other person here with a conbee ii reports the battery drain issue, but so far it seems usable to me.

I have the same problem.

Using a Nortek stick on 6.7.8, and ZHA. The Tradfri on/off buttons drain within a day of use.

Ha version core-2021.9.3

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Confirm Normally working with USB CC5231 and battery drain after moving to CC2651 Z-Stack 3.30+ (build 20210320)

I’ve been having similar issues with battry drain on the TRADFRI on/off remotes. Last week when it got completely drained in 24h I changed one parameter in my setup when I did the battery change and since then it’s been at 100% battery level.
The one thing I did differently this time was to do a “Reconfigure device” on the “Device” page of the remote directly after pairing the remote. I think I remember this being mentioned as part of the fix a few months back.
Not sure if this will help for anyone else, but might be worth a try.

Still nothing works for me… any updates concerning the DeconZ integration please?

I hate to say it, but as long as no error can be pinpoint, there will be no changes. No developer will start to investigate an error, that is not reproducable or even narrowed down.

Don’t misunderstand me, I have the same problems as all here in the thread, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up, that there will be some changes anytime soon… :wink: I started looking for another remote, thought my time is better invested in looking around than searching for a mysterious error… :slight_smile:

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I went also for an aqara button, but the rotary dimmer from Tradfri was nicer for volume control :slight_smile:

This isn’t exactly true. Until a dev comes out and mentions that they weren’t able to reproduce with the same flow that has been mentioned, these are all items that can be looked into.

I myself gave info about what stick, what firmware version, what HA version, and the behavior.

As a developer myself, that is enough to investigate.

With an entire thread’s worth of people reporting the same issue, the only thing that needs to happen is get all this information organized.

With all due respect. A few of us over on the Smartthings forum have pinpointed the error. About a year ago there were some fundamental changes to the Zigbee stack. At that time several beta testers noticed that battery powered devices did not work well with the new stack and several had battery issues. Rather than work on a proactively fix the battery issues the Zigbee upgrade was rolled out and a “reactive” approach to dealing with this was the flavor of the day.

Several of us have now confirmed that the issue is with zigbee routing. If the zigbee path back to your hub is stable, then these batteries will last as expected. But the second that the zigbee mesh/route changes then these devices fail to switch to low power mode and are dead within a few days. (add a device, power outage, etc)

Many of the battery device providers have upgraded their firmware to solve this problem. IKEA has not… The ball is in IKEA’s court to fix their products. Ironically this battery problem does not exist with the IKEA hub… Just “other” Zigbee" hubs. So IKEA won’t be fixing this anytime soon, since in their environment there is no problem on there environment.

Oh and this impacts both their buttons AND their Blinds… The blinds just take longer to drain their batteries since they are much bigger.

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And here we are, proving my point. What you’re saying is, some people have gathered information and named their specs. Seeing any dev right now? Seeing any one organising the informations? Nope, still nothing a dev could be attracted to… See, proving my point. :smiley: With this thread, I can’t see any dev jumping in and solving this. And as I said, I’m in the same boat as you, I just don’t get my hopes up, that something will happen here, that’s all I’m saying. :slight_smile:

You’re barking at the wrong tree here… :wink: I’m not a developer, I’m not a highly connected user who could force some devs to work on this, nor am I the guy who could solve this by himself. :wink:

I’m just the guy, that tells you, and all others in this thread, “don’t keep your hopes up”. In over two and a half years nothing has happened beside the user input. Do you really want to tell me, it is any different than in April 2019? Sorry, can’t see that… :slight_smile:

And if your findings are right (can’t say, I don’t know), again, do you really see any change happening here, if “The ball is in IKEA’s court to fix their products”? Sorry, I’m the messenger that tells you, here is nothing going forward.Believe it or not… :wink: :slight_smile:

I’m agreeing with your position that this isn’t going to get fixed any time soon (if ever)
I’m disagreeing with your position that no one can pin point the problem… That has been done. Short of rolling back to a previous Zigbee stack, only IKEA can fix this…