z-wave lock , what brand uses lowest battery? Z-Wave Plus?

Other Devices & Integrations Door Locks & Sensors
#1

I have a Veralite (to be upgraded to a VeraPLus) and I have always had trouble with the battery life on my zwave enabled
lock (I am away from home all week so I don’t remember what lock I have). I am assuming Z-Wave Plus would last longer but I have
searched over an hour or longer and not many hits on “Z-wave Plus” locks. Gets to be a problem if you are in a hurry and run out the door, don’t have a key
and did not notice battery was low.

Any suggestions?

Worth mentioning is I just bought a Goggle Home (yes I know Miscasaverde is building in Echo natively! Think Google is smarter tho).
But I will bring this up in another forum and ask there what people think.

…AR

#2

[quote=“araczek, post:1, topic:196037”]I have a Veralite (to be upgraded to a VeraPLus) and I have always had trouble with the battery life on my zwave enabled
lock (I am away from home all week so I don’t remember what lock I have). I am assuming Z-Wave Plus would last longer but I have
searched over an hour or longer and not many hits on “Z-wave Plus” locks. Gets to be a problem if you are in a hurry and run out the door, don’t have a key
and did not notice battery was low.

Any suggestions?

Worth mentioning is I just bought a Goggle Home (yes I know Miscasaverde is building in Echo natively! Think Google is smarter tho).
But I will bring this up in another forum and ask there what people think.

…AR[/quote]

You may get many different answers and half a dozen variables to play with if you are really having poor battery life. I have an old Kwikset 910 and the battery life is quite good even though I modified polling intervals and wakeup intervals.

VeraPlus shouldn’t have any difference on your battery life. The zwave plus locks would probably support the S2 encryption but even with that it would not drain the battery. Usually there are other factors at play.

Try the simplest of moving the vera closer to the lock. If that fails, exclude it and reinclude it to get back to all default settings. Check this website for your lock for tips and tricks. Contact the manufacturer. If all else fails and you are at the technological end then you might simply need a new updated lock.

#3

Yep, basically any z-wave lock installed correctly should get atleast 6 months of battery and usually should get closer to 9months or more.

There are basically 3 things that cause batter issues:

  1. If it has a motorized dead bolt, it must be installed properly, it should be extremely smooth, and the hole must be deep enough so that the motor goes into low power mode on install, otherwise it will run in high power mode and drain your battery. Make sure your dead bolt action is sumer smooth in all types of weather, temp, humidity.

  2. If the lock has z-wave communication problems it will have issue. The mesh must be strong enough with enough nodes that spec the security protocol that the lock supports to be happy, or it needs to be close to your base unit.

  3. If the probably is neither of the above, your hardware is likely malfunctioning in some way (another common source of battery drain)

One other tip:
If your lock is dying a lot and you don’t notice… don’t use a rechargeable battery, these tend to be hard to detect that the batter is low until it is too late, because they tend to report full charge until they are almost drained leaving you stranded. A good old, standard battery is going to give you better notifications of when the battery is getting close to end of life giving you much more advanced warning that it needs to be replaced. Make sure you setup a low battery alert in Vera to get email reminders that your battery is getting low.

#4

Good points above. After my current batteries are low I’m going to just try the Energizer lithium see how that goes.

#5

Well…on January 19th of 2016 I installed a Schlage Camelot with motorized lock and light up touch screen (BE469CAM716). I just had to change the batteries out for the first time two weeks ago. The luck gets operated several times a day motorized licking at least twice in the morning and motorized unlocking at least twice every evening. For a while it was 3 & 3 while my nephew was living here.

The advice about a clear and smooth latch bolt hole is very true…follow that. Don’t modify the polling interval. I don’t have mine set on auto relock do it reduces motorized cycles.

I had the kwickset…it’d chew up batteries every 3 weeks. I had to use rechargables to make it financially worth it to still ruin the lock…then it was every 2 weeks.

I wish I’d ordered more of the Camelot locks when I got that one on sale for $165 delivered.

#6

All-

Thanks for the quick replies. I did try my best to make sure the deadbolt wouldn’t get jammed in the hole.
I maybe could do better but the lock eventually died or so it seems. New batteries did not help it just faults.
So I was planning on a getting a new one anyway. Also there is a zwave switch near the door so I would think that
the mesh would propagate.

I’m kind of thinking of a Yale Real Living Key Free touchscreen lock.

…AR

#7

The Schlage BE469 installation manual has an interesting flow chart on page 13, step 11b. If it takes 2 tries to extend the deadbolt during initialization, then it goes to this step:

The lock has both a low power and high power mode. It will try low power first and then high power when unsuccessful. After three times using high power, it will always use the high power mode instead of trying twice each time. You may want to adjust your door/ frame to conserve battery power, but it is not necessary
It doesn't say what will reset this behavior back to low power if you do adjust your door/frame.