I Several IRIS 3326-L Motion Sensors. There is one spot in my House, my Wife’s walk-in closet, where the Motion Sensor Battery will drain in just a few or 1 day. Sometimes overnight. I thought it might be a bad sensor, but it has repeated with multiple sensors, that worked fine before moving to this location. I figure it had to be a signal issue of some kind. So I purchased 2 Centralite 4200-C wall plug repeater and plugged one into a wall shared with the walk-in closet (they other is on the other die of the my home). Once again the battery drained over night. I am using HA on Pi and a USB Zigbee/Zwave Stick from Nortek. After looking through some debus manually, it looked like the Motion Sensor was associating with the 4200-C that was further away. The logs are just to large to go through manually, so I tried to write a python script to pars the log for “lines” that included the network id for the sensor. But my script is having a problem with the character set in the log. I barely know python!
nfile=input('Enter the file name\n')
fhand=open(nfile)
newd=dict()
for line in fhand:
stuff=line.split()
for w in stuff:
#print(w)
newd[w]=''
#print(newd)
word=input('Please enter a Word\n')
if word in newd:
print(stuff)
result
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "c:\Scripts\HA Log parser.py", line 4, in <module>
for line in fhand:
File "C:\Python37\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode
return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 5430: character maps to <undefined>
As far as I understand the sensor work correctly outside of the closet. As soon as you put them in there, the battery drains. If you would put them outside of the closet again, they work normally.
Your repeater is plugged in the wall outlet inside the closet.
This is merely a shot in the dark, but I would guess that you have a lot of metal in the closet. If so, this could block the radio waves and therefore the sensor could try and increase the output power thus draining more energy. Since the repeater is in the same faraday cage, it would have the same behaviour.
You could try a quick test: Put the sensor in there with an open door. If the battery drains a lot less quick it might be the problem.
If you do not have metal in the closet, it might be the connection rage…
Have you tried to remove and repair the sensor after installing the second repeater nearby? Is the second repeater working well otherwise?
You mention it appears to still be associated with a far away repeater… that would seem to be the cause of the problem. It is safe to assume the farther repeater will have a weaker signal to your sensor. As CeeCee mentioned above, if there’s a lot of conductive material between the closet and repeater, that may create problems; lathe (stucco, tile, etc), shiny metallic wallpapers, and mirror doors must be included in this assessment along with metal appliances, and heavy mineral structures (bricks, cement, etc). I’m not a zigbee expert by any means, but I guess that repairing the device from it’s installed location might make it associate with the nearby repeater instead. The zigbee spec allows ‘remote pairing’. So it’s worth a shot.