Sensors with batteries that actually report?

Starting a thread here to see if anyone has recommendations for battery powered sensors that actually report battery levels so you can trust them. Interested in water sensors, and motion/temp.

This:

and this:

Are not the same, or the first does not imply the second. :slight_smile:

Many sensors report battery levels. I can only think of a couple I use that don't. But the information tends to not be reliable. This is partly because most of these use lithium batteries with a non-linear discharge curve, with voltage remaining fairly steady until the very end, when there's a sharp drop.

IMHO, a better approach is just to see when the sensors stop reporting and then take a look to see if there's a problem. That's why I wrote Device Activity Check, though there are alternative approaches you can use.

There's no reason to pick one approach or the other. You can also use battery levels, either in this app, as new optional column in the "Devices" page on hub update 2.3.8, with a Rule or Notifier app or even HSM, or a number of other approaches. But, of course, an app can't know better than the device itself, so you're still stuck with the issue of how battery reporting works in the first place, and it tends to not be great (I haven't seen reports of anyone claiming a particular device reports notably well compared to others, for example).

5 Likes

In addition to the previous post (I've also never see a battery device that doesn't report battery level - but it may report very infrequently, and often in 10s). I started fiddling with the WebCore graphing. That lets me see the relative rate of change, so I can learn where to set various status colors depending on how the batteries actually perform over time.

These are new sensors, literally inside the fridge and freezer, so I'm plotting it out to see if the freezer actually continues to plummet this fast, or if it's just due to cold and will level out...

ya agreed basically unreliable.. as they drop too quickly.. i do use device activity check to let me know if things stop responding

most of my motion sensors seem to report battery, but they also report temp at the same time.

with that being said, the battery levels are a crap shoot. i have some that insist they are 100 and been active for a year. Others that will report something like 60% and then stop reporting cause they died.

Iโ€™ve found my old Samsung leak sensors pretty accurate with battery.
Iโ€™ve had one in use for just over two years and it was reporting at like 26% the other week.

Not sure if Aeotec has a newer Zigbee version of this or not.

Good point and well received. Let me qualify "reliable battery reporting" in my case as whether the battery reports at all. I do use your Device Activity Check ( :pray:) to alert me to sensors that likely are dead.

I have three sensors right now - a Zooz ZSE30 that reports battery levels. A Zooz ZSE42 that does not and a Samsung GP-U999SJVLCAA that also does not.

So I will dig into the setup of these sensors and perhaps rejoin them as it appears that they should be reporting.

Similar experience to others here.

Pretty much all battery powered devices report battery levels or lifespan in some way (assuming theyโ€™re configured correctly with a driver that works with the device).

But pretty much all of them do a bad job of it, so it ends up not being very helpful.

1 Like

Yes, the ZSE reports battery level (along with wet/dry), those are the only two attributes it reports - By default, battery level is sent every 12 hrs, and Param #4, lets you set the "low alarm level"

The value isn't the accurate, as it tends to drop off quickly, after even sending a single message (then it recovers a few hrs later). - So again, it's not a great indicator like everything else, mention already - But the Zooz ZSE42 does indeed report battery lelve - Not sure about your Samsung

Hopefully I won't get scolded for saying this, but I really appreciate the battery voltage reports every 50 minutes from each of my Aqara sensors.