ZigBee battery drain across multiple brands and devices with Z2M

Configuration Zigbee
1

I’m using Z2M and I have a few Sonoff motion sensors and several of these cheap contact sensors. CR24540s are not only not cheap, but it’s a total pain in the ass to replace batteries this often. Even worse, ZigBee rarely tells me a device is dead.

How can I debug this? What can I do?

UPDATE: lol this network graph:

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Tentatively marking the below as the solution, as I only had one single router device that wasn’t the controller itself. In response, I moved all my Hue bulbs off the Hue Bridge and into my ZB network, so now I have a bunch of extra router devices. We’ll see how my devices act for the next few months.

2

There’s three options:

  1. Crap batteries
  2. Crap devices (some do just chew through batteries)
  3. Weak signal

The last can be caused by the distance between the end device and the router it connects to (or the coordinator), by not using a USB extension cable for the coordinator, or overlapping WiFi (or other 2.4 GHz signals).

3

@smugleafdev poor/bad reception will drain the battery and it sounds as if you do not have enough Zigbee Router devices to extend range/coverage of your Zigbee network so devices need to re-send messages and thus draining battery, therefore before you do any further troubleshooting read and try to follow these tips → Zigbee networks: how to guide for avoiding interference and optimize for getting better range + coverage

Zigbee depends heavily on mesh networking and only most but not all main-powered products act as Zigbee Router devices, while no battery-powered act as Zigbee Router devices.

4

Not a fan of Sonoff battery devices myself for multiple reasons and battery life was one. Never had their door sensor though.