Keen Vent 'issue'

Thanks for the response. It's interesting that only 10 of my 12 ate batteries and they were the ones that lost contact with the hub prior to that.. The other two are working fine. And the other 10 seem happy so far on Hubitat. I do have repeaters installed now, so maybe that's of some help.

Fast-forward to now, and I'm seeing still 1-3 weeks battery life on my 3 keen vents. The variation is simply because of the battery types I've been trying.

What can I do as a consumer to see wth is going on here? I basically have expensive dumb vents. I wonder if buying their hub would solve my issues? Does anyone use the Keen hub WITH HE? I've been going direct.

I have a vent connected to the HE hub (without the keen hub) that is not eating batteries. I do know that the vent is using a Sylvania smart plug as a repeater to get back to the HE hub. Could you possibly have a weak mesh issue?

did you turn on debug logging and see if you have a high message rate?

I have plenty of zigbee repeaters all over the house, and the vents are in various locations.

I'll have to turn on debugging---not something I've really played with before. I just know that it's consistent that the batteries die in like a week, and I never get a low battery notification from HE, like I do on everything else.

Debug logging only stays on for 30min before turning off, so not sure it will help much.

Curious, did you try using the keen hub ever to see if that would fix the battery issues? I'm wondering if HE can control the vents indirectly over the LAN.

nope.

I would pay a reasonable amount for a battery powered vent solution that actually works. Unfortunately, none of the options in the marketplace work for me; either untenable battery issues or not available in the sizes I need.

Could do something more exotic with duct based dampers, but am trying to avoid duct modifications - so I'm living with decidedly dumb vents.

Yeah, I just wonder if the vents are reporting more often than mine do.

I will say that when I was looking at mine in detail, they were not reporting/logging at a high frequency/anything I would have called excessive. A handful of reports per day (pressure and temp), plus one each time a vent is moved, as I remember.

I had temp and pressure on ST. I have never seen temp and pressure since moving my vent to HE. Mine only reports level and battery on HE. It opens/closes a couple tjmes a day and I typically got 4-6 months between battery changes on ST. Based on current battery % (assuming it's correct) it looks like similar battery usage on HE.

The Hubitat in box driver intentionally does not report some of the variables. They are likely being reported to the hub (they were on all of mine), but then just thrown in the trash by the driver.

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That works for me. The temp and pressure are useless data points for my use case.

Each to their own. I like to decide for myself which variables are useful to me - not the hub/driver.

It isn't like you save battery by the driver throwing the report in the trash... If it made the device not report the variable at all, thus saving battery, I think there would be a better argument to be had.

But whatever. :man_shrugging: Not my problem anymore.

I just realized that when you pair a vent, by default "Enable descriptionText logging" is turned on. Could that be an issue? I think that's on for all my devices.

I don't think so. I have descriptive text logging turned on for all of my devices. Too lazy to go through all 180 and turn it off. Did you try and reset and repair the device? Just a thought.

I had an Iris motion sensor that did the same thing. Ate batteries. I never was able to fix it. Ended up resplacing it.

My Multsensor 6 units also drain very quickly. Never had that issue on ST, but HE support can't find anything wrong. I get maybe 2 months out of the two batteries, instead of 2 years.

No. That is all on the hub/driver side, and has nothing to do with the end device (other than deciding whether or not to log something when it receives an event from the device).

So I made an RM to toggle the vent between 0 and 100 every 30 minutes. quick on and off with a 1 minute delay between. It seemed to go for about 6 hours, then it's as if the vent went to sleep. I tried initiating all sorts of commands manually and nothing would work. Ejected the batteries and put them back in and boom, back in business. In all fairness I did not try to reinitialize, refresh, or reconfigure. It does seem like odd behavior though.

So my vent made it 3 days before it... "fell asleep." I popped the battery cartridge and reinserted it. Came back online and still has 99% battery level.

Wonder what I can do to keep this from happening...