Poor Battery Life with Mailbox monitoring

[BONeil]

I am using a wireless sensor tag pro to monitor my mailbox and I am only getting roughly 3 weeks battery life out of it. Since I'm hearing rave reviews of these tags I am going to guess my configuration of the tag is most likely to blame. Can someone let me know where I may have gone wrong that depletes the battery so quickly? 

Here's the summary of the config;

Motion Options;

 - Sensitivity: 50

- Sampling Frequency: Higher

- Disarm at 10p, Arm at 10am (I'd like to just have this armed all the time ideally)

- Do not emit a sound when arming\disarming; enabled

- Mode: Door monitoring mode

- Threshold Angle: 30 degrees

- When door is opened, immediately: Notify on door close or when motion is not detected for a while

- Notify door open: Just once

Misc;

- Light; Off

- Record every 10 mins

- Notifications off

 

The program I have needs real time notification because I wanted to distinguish between the postman opening the mailbox and me by using the state of the front door, so I have;

If

    Elk Zone 'Front Door' is not Violated

    And "WirelessTags/Mailbox" Event State is Opened

Then

   Send notification to me content Mailbox Open

[tmorse305]

Make sure to use Energizer batteries. I made the mistake of buying some cheap batteries On Amazon. They last 1 week in the tags....

[larryllix]

I have tried all sorts of brands and they all last about the same for me, except the ones in the Dollar Store 3 for $1. Those ones can be decent to dead when you put them in. Likely old stock repackaged.

Sony, Eveready, and some brands I have never heard of before all last about 8-15 months. More often 8-10 months.

If you have monitoring on and boundaries to report you shouldn't need more than updates every 30 minutes. Turn the rest of the field monitoring off. They may be constantly reporting into thin air.

Recalibrate your frequency centering on the kumoapp webpage and adjust the bandwidth narrower (which ever is the lower power stated) if you have a good signal strength and/or less distance from the Tag manager. I can get about 1.5km on my Tag in the glove compartment using signal dropout detection, and the battery still lasts the usual 8-12 months while being cooked in the glove compartment.

I do see reports of people buying bulk batteries on amazon, ebay, and aliexpress getting bad batteries on arrival of the package. I have never experienced this yet. Most of my purchases average about $0.50-$0.75 per cell.

I don't use the NS. I use the kumoapps cloud server coding for ISY rest injection. I am not sure if there is any difference or if the notification setting apply. If you have installed the NS and uninstalled again, if may not have uninstalled the monitoring links in the kumoapp setup and be broadcasting frequently..

[BONeil]

Thanks. I definitely bought the good stuff at Target, Energizer Lithium CR2032 with a 2029 expiration date. I'm using them in my Elk sensors and they last more than a year so I'm fairly confident it's not the batteries. 

I will lower the sampling and tweak the sensitivity. A few questions;

- does the sampling frequency impact the the triggering of the device?

-whats the deal with arm\disarm? I turned the schedule off, armed the device and it disarmed on its own one evening, and there's no way to arm through the ISY.

-when you say re-calibrate the frequency - is that the tag manager mode? (wide to narrow bands) It doesn't say either would save battery, but I would assume wide band which is what I have it on. 

[larryllix]

9 minutes ago, broneil said:

Thanks. I definitely bought the good stuff at Target, Energizer Lithium CR2032 with a 2029 expiration date. I'm using them in my Elk sensors and they last more than a year so I'm fairly confident it's not the batteries. 

I will lower the sampling and tweak the sensitivity. A few questions;

- does the sampling frequency impact the the triggering of the device?

-whats the deal with arm\disarm? I turned the schedule off, armed the device and it disarmed on its own one evening, and there's no way to arm through the ISY.

-when you say re-calibrate the frequency - is that the tag manager mode? (wide to narrow bands) It doesn't say either would save battery, but I would assume wide band which is what I have it on. 

Yes. I don't remember the details but it has popups that describe the differences. IIRC one of them was battery life, or range of comms.

I don't use the NS so I don't know about remote arm/disarm. I permanently arm the fields I want to trigger events. I use the arming to enable my garage door position only. The one I have works by Earth magnetic fields and mounted on a steel door it is not too dependable. I also use Monitoring? for my fridge unit. It says it reports door position changes triggered from lux level changes.