That has been my experience too. This is a really flaky issue. Sometimes the buttons will work (and not drain their batteries) and other times you wake up to a house full of dead buttons. I have tried a HUSBZB stick and the Sonoff 3.0 Zigbee stick as well as SmartThings integration. ALL drained the batteries after a few days. The buttons work reliably with the Tradfri hub and IKEA integration to HA. But the Tradfri hub and integration does NOT report button events… Which makes them useless to trigger items other than the ones that IKEA has them paired with.
This seems 100% to be a zigbee routing issue. Just plugging in my Tradfri hub to do a firmware update killed the batteries in half of my zigbee blinds overnight without ANY integrations to either Smartthings or HA.
If your Zigbee mesh is stable with minimal “hops” back to your hub/stick then these buttons can work. If your Zigbee mess is always changing (new devices, power outages, etc) then these buttons will be dead the next day.
Wow, that’s similar to what I was seeing when I had my Ikea buttons and remotes connected to a different hub.
My E1810 has been connected with zigbee2mqtt (Smartllight CC2652P coordinator) for a week or two, and the battery is at 87%.
My coordinator came with the egony 20210319 firmware on it.
For what it’s worth, I have a husbzb-1 using ZHA integration and my remote battery lasts a few months, with everyday usage. I also have a Tradfri repeater, which it connects to, so I’m not sure if that makes a difference.
I have the same ZigBee setup but use symfonisk rotary control, one-off button and the four button remote.
All last months.
The two symfonisk are used as volume knobs to our TVs and are heavily used. I believe it was in June or July I bought them and no battery change yet.
One says 60% the other 74%.
I have had some success by automatically running the join zha service overnight for 5 minutes. This seems to ensure the remotes all stay connected for much longer than what it did before. Practically stopped my battery issues on all my Ikea remotes.
Every step someone claims to have this fixed… I buy some more hardware based on that recomendation only to discover that this problem remains. HUBZBZ and Sonoff 3.0 USB sticks BOTH drain the IKEA buttons (and other battery powered Zigbee devices)
Apparently the problem wasn’t just the batteries, turns out some where fine the remotes where just completely losing the network and required full resets to reconnect. (this is specifically supposed to be fixed in the Zstack firmware update)
Switched to Zigbee2mqtt, it is more effort to setup but they seem to be involved in the firmware development and have FIRMWARE specific directions for IKEA buttons (can’t bind to groups after firmware X, have to do a device bind etc). Also my devices stopped responding after the firmware update, apparently Zibee2mqtt detects firmware updates and can restore the network ZHA can’t.
The Binding process (remote direct controlling the blinds) under Zigbee2mqtt worked nearly flawlessly the first time I tried it. The UI also clearly shows a FAST success or fail feedback prompt which is missing in ZHA.
I was able to bind all my remotes directly to my blinds (no groups needed) still working today, will monitor for the next week… ALL blinds actually opened on schedule today no failures.
zigbee2mqtt allows for greater OTA firmware control, instead of always on or off you can to can turn it on when needed. It also displays the firmware in the IKEA number format to make it easier to compare.
It has been 6 days and I have not had any significant battery drain… I have had one blind lose contact with the network twice however which was corrected by rebooting zigbee2mqtt so I am investigating that.
Can you run the buttons without binding them to the blinds? I have 9 blinds in my house and I have several extra buttons… I want to use these buttons to trigger other events… If these can only drive blinds then we might as well just use the IKEA hub…
As I read this the Zigbee2mqtt only exposes the buttons as part of a pairing with the roller binds?
If that is the case it is useless… Even the buttons in the room I would like the option that if you press up and it is after sunset, it leaves the binds down, but turns on the lights… An easy automation with HA. But not if an up press always opens the binds.
Mostly since the Zigbee2MTTQ documentation reads
“[Button Firmware] 2.3.75 and greater: supports binding to devices only”
That is not clear if it means that these only work if they are binded to a device (like IKEA requires)
Or if it means that after that firmware version the buttons can no longer be binded to a group and just devices (also like IKEA offers) but that devices binding is optional (which IKEA does not do)
Ideally I do not want to bind the buttons to any thing… So you are saying that the “devices only” in the documentation means that they can be used unbinded too?
There is a similar warning on the repeaters too… That they need to be paired to a button or a roller blind first. (or to be specific… Zigbee2MTTQ documentation “recommends that” ) Since we have all but guaranteed that the battery drain issue is a Zigbee route/re-route issue I’m curious exactly how people who are getting this to work are “pairing” the buttons, blinds and repeaters.
Thanks… I think I’m starting to get this… You can bind them… but you don’t have to…
And after the firmware update they only can be bound to one device… not to a group…
I bind the blind buttons directly, because they are physically there with the blinds and I always want them to work EVEN if HA is rebooting or the controller is down.
Also the functionality with blinds SUCKS if you do it as events instead of direct binding.
If you direct bind the ikea blind remote to blinds you get the following behaviours:
Click up/Down while closed starts to open/close
Click up/Down while opening/closing stops current action
Hold up/Down starts up/down action and then stops when released
If you have the remote bound to HA and use the open or close action the button will only fully open or fully close the blind and seems to ignore any commands till that is complete.
Take a look at EPMatt’s Blueprints for the various IKEA buttons and remotes; pretty sure they can do exactly what you described without binding them to the device(s) you are looking to control.
