Can you share what you did in case it helps others with a similar task?
Yes yes… I plan to… I’ve been making notes and will share them once I finish testing.
I also planning to try too other methods to improve battery life; deep-sleep cycling and then shut-off cycling. The thing with both of these though is that I will need to expand the GPIOs by either soldering one (for deep-sleep) or two (for shut-off) wires to the ESP8266EX chip. This will be the most difficult part of the project, but it’s a good thing I bought extra ESP-01Ss that I can experiment with. Can’t do it now, because I don’t have a small enough soldering tip and thin enough solder to pull this off. I may also need some magnifying element - either magnifying glass or one of those nice electronic magnifiers - to get the soldering part done properly. I will update the thread with this also, with photos as all when I get to that part.