I currently have several that have a 10 second timeout, with an app keeping a light on for 5 minutes.
I'm experimenting with having a timeout of 5 minutes and making the app 0.
Will I get better battery life with this strategy?
Thanks.
I doubt it. What rationale are you using to think that?
If you trigger the sensor by walking in front of it, it does what it does regardless of how long the timeout is.
Likewise, if you don't walk in front of the sensor, no matter how long the timeout is, it still sends that status.
If you walk by the sensor 100 times a day, that is still 100 wakeups of the sensor, even if the sensor still hasn't timed out.
Could it possibly save one Active or Inactive message to the hub each time you trigger it? Possibly, I'm not sure if they still send that status, or if every sensor acts identical. But I doubt that it adds up to much because the sensor is still seeing and processing the motion event.
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Where / how exactly were you aiming to get the longer timeout for the sensor? In the device page in HE? And what make / model sensor(s) are you using and with what driver?
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That is true.
Depending on the sensor, it does have the possibility to at least cut down on the Zigbee, Z-Wave, or whatever traffic. How much that will save on battery, I don't know (depends if it's significant enough compared to the PIR sensor itself, I suppose), but it seems unlikely to hurt. At the very least, it's slightly less traffic and events on your hub, which can't hurt. With your interval being 10 seconds, that is pretty frequent, and you're likely getting more of this than you really need, though again, it may or may not actually affect anything practical for you.
This assumes it's a sensor that sends active and inactive messages, which most of the above protocols that I am familiar with do. Some unusual ones just send an active message from time to time and rely on the driver to know the timeout instead of sending an inactive message (and some do both!), but that isn't common.
As a side note, I always like to give myself a little leeway on the hub (so I might do 1 minute or even 4 instead of 5, then put the rest of the delay in the automation), but that's just personal preference--easier to change an app than wake a Z-Wave sensor to change oit, for example. 
I do pretty much alway change any default reporting that's extremely frequent like 10 or 15 seconds to something a bit longer if I can, though, for the above reasons.
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