Knock on wood, mine has been working well for a week or so now and is down to 87%. I haven’t made any real changes though I think there was a new firmware released so perhaps that was a factor.
This has been my experience as well. The issue can re-occur if you ever get a power outage and you lose all of your powered repeaters and the battery gizmos start to “ping” the “dead air”. When the power comes back on sometimes the battery powered devices will start to “ping” the wrong repeater and they will have a dead battery in a day or two. The goal is to have a SINGLE repeater close to the battery powered device so that when the power comes back the end device does not get a new “route” back to the hub.
This is also a problem if you use the buttons as mobile remotes throughout your house. Move them to a different room with a different “extender” and the battery will be dead fast. Every time you move the button you need to remove the battery and re-pair it to the hub through the new closest repeater.
my experience has been that a “new route” always = dead battery.
having the same issue with various Ikea switches.
I’ve moved from zha,conbee2 to z2m sonoff and the battery dies within 2 days. 1 device managed to keep working though! not sure why, but is seems an older/newer model (Made in china 2050 for the working one, 2117/2113 for the draining ones).
I’m not sure what to do. all switches are already on the latest firmware.
other zigbee switches like these are way more expensive.
Ok, after setting the switch to not report battery status, it lasted one week. I’m clueless…
Made this for my daughter at least 
How close is the nearest mains-powered device, and you did pair it in the final position didn’t you? 
If you pair it next to the hub, guess which device the unit communicates with? Yup - the hub, not the repeater 1m away. Killed a few CR3032 that way after expecting a Zigbee mesh recalculation to happen like Z-Wave.
I’m currently seeing 5-button remotes work with ZHA with a very close IKEA mains switch (RF mesh repeater), but ones without last about 1-3 days.
I do like the 2xAA box hack. Extra points for IKEA AA cells!
So how long do the AA batteries last?
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The latest firmware mentions optimized battery performance and stability improvements:
I am installing it right now, but I am not sure if I will be able to tell the difference. Since I am on Zigbee2MQTT and connect the buttons only through the IKEA LED drivers instead of directly to HA, things have been quite stable.
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Hmm… Not sure, I tried to do a OTA Firmware update with Zigbee2MQTT (which works, once you figure it out) and it stated that there was no update. OK undeterred, I got out my old IKEA hub, installed a fresh battery in an unused button, paired it to the hub and asked the hub to update it… Again, the hub reported that 2.3.079 was the current version…
Not sure what this update is, if it is just a hub update or if it is pending.
Also interesting, the IKEA hub was also reporting a remote with a low battery in spite of a brand new 3v Cell installed that tested at 3.24V on my multi meter.
The 5-button remote firmware update0x24040005 / v24.4.5 is real, and apart from requiring a pre-release Zigbee quirks file (likely until HASS 2023-03), is working well with ZHA + Yellow. Early indications suggest less polling → better battery life.
Details of how to install the pre-release Zigbee quirks file are in the linked GitHub issue:
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That fixed it, thank you!
FYI - since update 0x24040005 / v24.4.5 and HASS 2023-03, all of my 5-button remotes have been rock-solid, work every time, and the battery life seems excellent.
Could this long standing issue be fixed for ZHA? Looks like it to me!
Not for me and my two button remote. I’ve tried everything.
Latest firmware, latest HA and the nearest Shortcut button to the coordinator just ate three batteries in the last 6 days. Had no problems for a year with my Conbee, but since switching to Skyconnect this started happening for me.
Same here three On/Off remotes and all of them lose connection and battery in a few days, one month after switching from deconz to SkyConnect. Never had this problem before.
Same here. When I was using original IKEA gateway I did not have this problem. I moved all remotes to HA with sonoff coordinator. I have 3 on/off remotes and 1 circle one with brightness and colour change buttons. The circle one and one of the on/off remote seems to work fine, but another 2 on/off remotes eat battery in few days. What I noticed is the one which seems to work fine after some time battery level sensor is going to unavailable and is coming back to available when any button is pressed. Looks like remote is going to some kind of sleep mode and wakes up after use. Another 2 of them showing battery level all the time.
IKEA just published (May 29) a significant update for Tradfri buttons and their roller blinds the firmware is reported to “Optimised battery performance”
Do you think that after 2+ years maybe IkEA finally fixed these things?
I have begun the OTA firmware updates. I will let you know if anything changes or is better.
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Keep us updated! How do you get the updates? Do you need an idea zigbee hub?
OTA Firmware updates are in the docs:
In the past I have successfully did OTA firmware updates with Zigbee2Mqtt (with a Sonoff stick).
The blinds are easy, the buttons need to be woken up at just the right moment to take the update
Proceed with caution, since my update, my Blinds are flooding MQTT with update requests.
I’m investigating.
So far I have updated 9 Blinds and 2 of my 9 buttons.
After the update the Blinds immediately flooded the MQTT system with messages and crashed the Zigbee system. It was interesting in that you could see the blinds randomly change the repeater that it was using… I suspect that this is the issue with the battery drain with the buttons. Before the patch, you could see the blinds “ping” a different repeater dozens of times a second.
By the next day I found a “Polling” patch on github so proceed with caution if you have Fytura blinds
The two buttons I updated now report nearly dead batteries, but that is expected since the OTA normally drains about 20-30% of the battery to complete the 3-4 hrs of radio traffic.
I will let you all know if the batteries last more than a few days.