I have two Iris 3460-L Smart Buttons that were not responding. Both of them had battery levels in the device page of 90% or better but both batteries when pulled were around 2.65 volts. I have the a Notifications App set up as Battery Level with the parameters of monitoring Battery Level with the slider for "Monitor All Battery Levels" active. Notification parameter is when battery level is below 30. I have it set up to report once a day via a Pushover notification between the hours of 0800 and 2200.
I am not getting notifications. That is not good as I am not sure if my contact sensor and motion sensor batteries are being reported accurately now. I am also not sure if I will be notified in time to replace them.
Is my Notification written correctly? Is there an issue with the Notification app? Does the problem lie elsewhere?
This is hard to answer without more information but should be easy for you to narrow down: does the device page show a battery level that your Notification app is configured to report? It will only see the same information the device page has, so if that's not what you think it should be, there's the problem. Battery reporting is notoriously unreliable for a lot of devices but especially those that use lithium batteries. If this is your problem, I might suggest something like Device Watchdog or Device Monitor, which look for device activity and can notify you if it's been "too long."
If that does look right, it could be a problem with your Notifications setup. If you have a time restriction set, for example, you may not get a notification if the battery drops below the threshold outside that restriction. Could that explain your issue?
Would the notifier not then report the battery level low during the time period set? Before I set up the time restriction, (admittedly, on the other hub with the Iris V1 devices), it was nagging me about a low battery level. It was not just a one-time report.
I think it might have more to do with the Lithium batteries. However, the Iris hub used to be able to give me a fairly accurate battery level and warn me when a device's battery was getting low. In both of these instances, the button controllers had the batteries drop to the point the button controllers could not respond to a key press (no light). I would have thought that I would have gotten something a bit more precise than a 90% battery level reading for them to let me know the voltage was dropping and it was time to replace the battery in each device.
My guess is your battery is dead and your device won't be sending anything long before your 30% level is reached. Try raising you level to something like 60%.
I'll raise the level. It still is strange that it was reporting high levels and never did show anything less (like 85%, 80%, or 70%. It was displaying 90% while it was essentially dead. If I had seen it dropping, I would have been able to catch it before the buttons went dead. I'm not sure how Iris was able to track battery levels, even for Lithium batteries.
The docs aren't clear and we can't see the source, but my guess is that you will not get a notification if an event happens inside your "restricted" period--another battery event would need to happen when it's "OK," and then you'd get a notification. (One happening during the restriction won't cause a notification on its own when the restriction period ends.) If it never gets another battery report, you won't get anything. Whether this happens depends on how often your device sends battery reports (and if anything actually changed) and possibly on whether it survived long enough to report outside the period again (probably would, but who knows). You can verify some of this by checking the event history on your device.
Regarding the above post, I'll repeat my advice that battery reporting tends to be unreliable. This is for various reasons: some are just bad at reporting (e.g., too infrequent) and some just have a hard time predicting percentage of life due to non-linear lithium cell discharge rates. You may try the suggestion above to raise the threshold but might have to experiment with what works best for each device. Personally, I only monitor device activity (a bit less proactive but definitely no false positives ).
I don't see an option for "wait" in the restrictions of the notification app. I only see options for "Between two times" which has selections for Specific Time, Sunrise, and Sunset for Start and End times; "Only on certain days of the week," and "Only when mode is."
This is in the Notifications app.
As for events, I have seen the battery levels on some devices (particularly, my wife's key fob) bounce back and forth between above the cut-off and below the cut-off. This was with a Lithium CR2 battery on an Iris V1 device. I'm not so sure about the Iris V2 devices though. It may be that the battery level just isn't reporting correctly from the buttons since the number I saw was around 90% but the batteries were essentially dead. I don't know how the device can report a low battery if the voltage I see being reported is well above any reasonable cut-off.
Edit: I have deleted and recreated the notification without the restriction and with a higher threshold level for reporting. I still would rather see the battery levels reported in a column on the Devices page.
I have a battery contact sensor (Iris 3320-L) on an important piece of equipment and it reported 87% at 9:25 this morning, when I tested the contact sensor/notification today, it didn't register the change
Checked the voltage at 3.0, new was 3.26. Installed new battery and the device works as it should
I'm using the Notification app and had my battery level set to 60%, I just raised it to 75% to see if that helps
It's still reporting temp and open/close reliably, however the battery level has been at 77% since March.
I have my low battery notification set to 75%, my concern is it won't get there before it dies. If a battery can stay at 77% for 7 months or more, I don't want to raise my notification up then I would be replacing batteries well before they need to be.
This being an Iris 3320-L, at what % is this thing just going to die?
I sure would feel better if we could get a battery level log entry every day or maybe once per week. Yes I am using the Device Watchdog app which does bring peace of mind
Rick
Update: LOL, another thread here suggests to press configure/refresh to force the device to report battery level
Refresh on the device = no change
Press Configure = battery now report 62% and guess what I got, a low battery notification (threshold set at 75%)
I gave up using the notification app for most of my battery devices due to the same issues you have seen. I have 5 of the Iris 3320-L contact sensors with the original batteries over a year and a half now. My lowest one is at 87% and I didn't have any change after hitting configure. It seems that what percentage to change the battery depends on the device and type of lithium battery it uses. I can keep using devices with the 2450 lithium batteries until they get down to 30-40% range in the refrigerator, or 50-60% at room temp, but with the larger batteries I think it would be prudent to change them sooner.
That is my current solution. I looked in the logs to see what was reporting, and then ignored that and removed everything being monitored except for the First Alert smoke/co detectors. Having a strong mesh has certainly had a positive effect on the battery life of my devices. My ST buttons died within a few months, but since moving the HE to a central area, and adding many repeaters, I haven't had to replace any batteries so far this year. I'm thinking of going with device monitoring, since a battery going dead is merely an inconvenience for most things, and the batteries last so long that it seems a waste of resources worrying about them.
Personally, I use Device Watchdog to let me know when devices have stopped responding. You do have to do a little guesswork and estimate how long you're willing to let devices not check in before you get concerned about them, so it's not as proactive as battery monitoring (which this app could also do but I don't use) might be, but I find it much more of a reliable method. I have several child apps--one that only lets devices not check in for a few hours, one for something like 24 hours, and one for nearly a week. I could probably break this down a bit more, but it just depends on your devices: some of mine check in nearly every hour (Xiaomi) or are at least likely to send some event in a few-hour timeframe (most temperature-sensing devices), whereas I have some like my Kevo Convert lock and smoke detectors that will go days without reporting anything at all, even battery levels.
I'll probably add battery-based reporting to this at some point (maybe for locks or things I might really care about), but for the rest, it works well for me. For example, if a motion sensor battery goes dead during the day, it's of little consequence for me, and if it goes dead at night, I'll notice because my automations aren't working. This helps me catch some of them before the latter happens.
This bug just got me too. Low battery on smoke alarm did not report.
So I did some testing and set up rules to also detect low battery. For two different types of devices when battery went below level the rules triggered but the Notification app did not.
I use Notification app for several other types of notifications and they work fine. So it seems like its just some specific bug related to battery attribute.
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