I have been having atrocious battery life with my Keyfree connected to my Vera Lite and HomeWave for remote access.
It only lasts for a few weeks (more than once it has died in less than a month). I tried replacing standard alkaline batteries with Lithium and it still doesn’t last that much longer.
Now I have bought rechargeables so I don’t have to keep buying batteries.
Last Friday, it worked fine with no low battery warning and then I left for work on Monday morning and the battery had dropped so low in those two days that I could not even lock the door from the keypad. I had to come back in and manually lock the door with the knob and leave the house through a different door because I didn’t have time to mess with it.
On the way home from work, I picked up a 9V battery so I could get back in through the normal door.
Are there any settings I can change that will allow me to use Vera Lite automation functionality and still have long battery life?
I see reviews stating the battery is supposed to last anywhere from 5 to 12 months.
I don’t even see 5 weeks and I only open and close the lock on average 2 to 4 times a day with some of that using the knob to manually open the door from the inside.
Not that this is a solution, but is there any way to also get email notifications of low battery?
I just tried that and now it says “Device failed to configure” and it still shows battery at the same 6% level as before I put new batteries in 15 minutes ago.
I put it back to 60, saved it and then back to 10800 and saved a second time and it worked.
What is going to take 3 hours with this polling time setting that would normally take 1 minute?
it takes hours for mine to configure and set associations usually, as it’s a battery device it has to wake up, not sure why the rest of process always takes so long, but always works when done
can try a manual poll, that should update batery status, if not updated battery status in a day and wont configure, would say needs to be excluded\included
Just for the record, polling time has nothing to do with the time it takes fo configure the lock to Vera.
Polling is when Vera asks the lock what state (locked/unlocked) it is in, and Vera will then run appropriate triggers (if any) should the state have changed from what Vera thought it was in.
However, most battery operated devices like the lock will explicitly send the state change to Vera when it happens. This is commonly known as “Instant Status”. Zwave devices that are powered by AC are often not “Instant Status” devices, in that they do not explicitly send messages to Vera when things change. For those devices, Vera must poll the device periodically in order to determine if the state has changed. (Which is why it is important to get Instant Status devices for things that require immediate response. But I digress…)
Polling an Instant Status devices is not really necessary, assuming that there is good communication between Vera and the device. The only time polling an Instant Status Device is needed is if the original state change message from the device is somehow lost.
Some releases of Vera set the polling interval for locks to two minutes or less. That constant polling of course depletes the locks battery. I turn my polling off for my locks (set the polling interval to 0) with no ill effects. Others set it for three or more hours to achieve satisfactory battery life.
I have a older electronic keypad lock, and I get a year and a half in constant use. Z-wave should not really add that much. Why poll so often? Just need it to wake up and send when opened and send when locked. Should not be a big drain.
aa6vh, does your batter status update with that set to zero, I was thinking that polling was required to get that status
as a random side note, would be really nice if vera would pre-populate device options as monitor only in ui7 so we did not have to research and add them to each new device, much easier for vera to do once, then everyone else to do every time they add a new device
I think so, as the battery reading seems appropriate. I will have to verify that though.
If one is concerned about that, then you could set the polling to some large value. Polling once a day for example would not be much of a burden on the battery.
My recommendation for Yale locks (I have KeyFree as well, but should be all of them) is to set PollSettings to 10800 as previously mentioned, and also use a manual route of “0” so the lock communicates directly with Vera. Now if the distance is too far for the manual route, obviously that will not work. Mine are ~20 feet away from Vera and they still tried to build crazy auto routes that did not work nearly as well as the direct route. But even with a strong signal and locks that work otherwise perfectly, they will take a while to configure, both at install and also during a heal… Partly due the nature of battery-powered Z-wave devices, and partly due to the security beaming specific to locks…
[quote=“webuser, post:1, topic:185148”]I have been having atrocious battery life with my Keyfree connected to my Vera Lite and HomeWave for remote access.
It only lasts for a few weeks (more than once it has died in less than a month). I tried replacing standard alkaline batteries with Lithium and it still doesn’t last that much longer.
Now I have bought rechargeables so I don’t have to keep buying batteries.
Last Friday, it worked fine with no low battery warning and then I left for work on Monday morning and the battery had dropped so low in those two days that I could not even lock the door from the keypad. I had to come back in and manually lock the door with the knob and leave the house through a different door because I didn’t have time to mess with it.
On the way home from work, I picked up a 9V battery so I could get back in through the normal door.
Are there any settings I can change that will allow me to use Vera Lite automation functionality and still have long battery life?
I see reviews stating the battery is supposed to last anywhere from 5 to 12 months.
I don’t even see 5 weeks and I only open and close the lock on average 2 to 4 times a day with some of that using the knob to manually open the door from the inside.
Not that this is a solution, but is there any way to also get email notifications of low battery?[/quote]
you can set up an alert for
low battery
very low battery
battery goes below %
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