IKEA Sound controller/Symfonisk Remote has very high battery drain/very low battery life

[azman]

Hello,
I am trialling several of these devices on my HE Zigbee network and as stated in the subject, the battery life is terrible. I'll get anywhere from a day to a week out of a battery.

Hypotheses

1. Dodgy IKEA batteries
I have burnt through three IKEA batteries within two days, since writing this, I have purchased some Energiser lithium batteries to test if it is a battery issue. However, 30 minutes after inserting an Energiser, its level is now reported as ~50% (down from 100%).

2. Issues with connectivity, not connected to IKEA repeaters
I have read in other posts like this one and this one, which postulate the issue being the devices are not connected to IKEA repeaters (IKEA Tradfri plugs). However, my remotes are all within a meter of a repeater and after viewing th routes at http:///hub/zigbee/getChildAndRouteInfo I can see that all remotes are connected to a IKEA plug.

3. Hardware issue with the remote
I have four remotes all exhibit the same behaviour. None have lasted beyond a couple of weeks, some have only lasted a day. I purchased some of them at different times, but they still might be from the same batch.

This is plausible, but there is not enough evidence either way.

4. Issues with HE
There are several (1) comments (2) by other users that moving away from HE solves the battery issue. This is still only conjecture, however, it does seem like the most likely hypothesis at this point.

[UPDATE] 2021-06-28
I recently purchased a ConBee II and started messing around with Home Assistant. So far the battery life has not changed on the Symfonisk remote at all. In actual fact, the battery has gone up from 47% to 60%. I'm not entirely certain why that would happen, but there you go. I'll add further updates regarding the battery life as I remember to do so.

[UPDATE] 2021-07-04
The battery is still at 60% on Home assistant. I've opened a ticket with Hubitat support, however, it's a bit of a black hole in terms of communication. I don't really know what's going on there, I've asked for feedback or some-kind of acknowledgement but I get nothing. Further attempts to reach out with new tickets are simply shut down. If you're looking for support, don't expect anything brilliant from Hubitat.

[UPDATE] 2021-07-14
While being connected to a Home Assistant box I have built, the battery life remains at 60%. On occasion, when it's particularly cold, the batter seems to drop a bit, however, long term the level remains quite consistent and I am yet to see the same kind of drain I did when it was connected to the HE.

[UPDATE] 2021-07-26
Battery life is still at 60%

[UPDATE] 2021-08-10
Battery life is still at 60%

Next steps
I'd like to explore the fourth hypothesis a little more, however, I'm not all that experienced with HE yet. I'm looking for guidance on where I might look, or whom I might talk to in order to dig deeper in to the battery life issue. I do have some finite resources at my disposal, so a small amount of coding and debugging of drivers may not be out of the question, but first things first, what's the best way to debunk this hypothesis?

Thanks,
Aaron

[BiGs]

Yes, this has been largely debated in other threads.

I find the device very attractive, in terms of design, construction and capabilities, but battery life is absolutely unpredictable.

In my experience, battery life can go from one week to six months. Same device can behave in different ways when battery is changed and the device re-joined.

My own hypothesis was that the signal routing of the device made it either to power up the emission, or to increase the frequency of handshakes with the Zigbee network. (This was only product of my guessing due to my absolute ignorance.)

That made me rejoin the device, when changing batteries, very close to their fixed destination, hoping that they would link to the closest repeater (a light bulb 20 cm away).

But changing batteries and rejoining two devices this way gave completely different results. One died in just one week, the other continues working in a fully reliable way (four months so far).

Tired of trying, every time one has the battery dead, I replace it with a Philips Hue or a Xiaomi Mi button (depending on the use).

If you find the solution (which I guess is a software issue, firmware, driver or who knows what) I’ll be willing to follow!

[bf1]

Ditched all mine, persevered for months with lots of reliability issues and battery challenges. Whilst I miss the volume function, the Lutron Pico Sonos will suffice and Hue smart buttons for everything else.

[azman]

Updating this with a comment as I think that after a month, it seems clear that the Hubitat has some issues when working with the Symfonisk remote relating to excessive battery drain.

The battery is still at 60% on the HomeAssistant system I set up. While not absolutely conclusive, it does seem as though the near instant battery drain which occurs on the Hubitat is an issue with Hubitat and not the Symfonisk remote.

I opened a support ticket with Hubitat however, I have had no communication from them and repeated attempts to get feedback, status updates or even just a non automated response saying, "we hear you, we can't work on it right now" are not forthcoming.

The HE was supposed to be a purchase where I didn't have to work too hard to get things up and running, which for the most part I guess I accomplished. However, because of this issue I was introduced to HomeAssistant (which I originally discounted because I didn't want to tinker) and frankly speaking, it's a better experience with a large and more responsive community.

The lack of support is a bit of a deal breaker for me, and while I may continue to use the HE, I am exploring the HA more and all things being equal, I'll move across and ditch the Hubitat.

[janzilverstone]

I have the same issue…

Does any of you know if it has been solved?

My thesis is that the device handler / driver is not handling this correctly

[azman]

Sadly, no. Or at least, not that I'm aware of.
I have had zero response from Hubitat. Support seems to be non-existent.

I have re-written the driver to see if it's a driver issue but, I think it's more to do with something deeper inside Hubitat and perhaps something non-standard in the way the IKEA device firmware runs (or perhaps how Hubitat runs). I imagine this is common and in these situations for other devices, Hubitat have written work-arounds for dodgy firmware. Not for this case, it seems.

I have moved off Hubitat to Home assistant in one of setups I manage, and will likely continue that way in the future.

For the Hubitat with the dial, I have switched to a different device which is not as good but provides the same sort of functionality . The terncy-sd01, which I've written a driver for. (here: [BETA] xiaoyan - terncy-sd01 driver)

Best of luck!

[janzilverstone]

Update July 24:
Battery on 60% - seems legit. Stable connection no issues to report Will now stop updating thread!

Update June 23.
Battery on 60% - seems legit. Stable connection no issues to report

Update April 21:
Battery changed today but died April 17 so going from 87% to 0% in 3 days doesn’t seem normal. I might have used it a bit more. I don’t seem to be able to trigger a report from the device to report battery level Anyone w. An idea about how

Update April 14:
Battery reports 87%
That I can actually live with. But let's see I'll update occasionally

Update April 5:
No battery update - how often would these come through from the device?

Update April 3:
Battery still reports 100%

Update April 1.:

I updated the FW and use the driver from @birdslikewires

Button Controller 5.1 setup:
Pause/start works fine - press button 1
Volume up - release button 2
Volume down - release button 2

Since last night battery level has NOT changed. Still 100% I will update over the next days to see if it's consistant.

[azman]

Good luck!

I found I would sometimes get a week of 100% with a fresh battery, but then suddenly it would die. I hope you have a better experience!

Keep us updated =)