Fibaro smoke sensor unreliable battery status?

[goran 9]

For quite some time I have been running a script every night that reads the battery level from all devices and stores it in a file.

For any other device other than the Fibaro smoke sensors, the battery level goes down a little bit every time, naturally. But the Fibaro smoke sensors shows another behaviour. They report 100%. Always 100%. Until they start to make a small beep sound every now and then. When they do, nothing particular is shown in HC2 and the battery level is still reported as 100%. If I awake the beeping smoke sensor manually, HC2 is updated with a battery level of 0%. So I guess the beep really means it's of of battery although nothing is shown in HC2.

 

In other words:

day 1: 100%

day 2: 100%

day 3: 100%

<and so on>

day 200: 100%

day 201  100%

day 202: 100%, it starts to make beep sound every now and then

day 203: 100%, still beeping

day 204: 100%, still beeping

day 205: 100%, still beeping

<it goes on like this until manually waked up, so I'm waking it up>

day 206: 0%

day 207: 0%

day 208: 0%

<and so on>

 

Even when it has been at 0% for several days it is not marked as dead.

 

I have now had this behaviour with 3 of my Fibaro smoke sensors by now. The others are still reported to be at 100% which is absolutely not correct.

My biggest concern is that nothing is shown in HC2 even though the devices are obviously losing all power and will eventually stop working.

 

Did anyone else notice this?

[MalvinYNJ 4]

So theoretically, it lasted for 202 days?

 

Check your wakeup interval?

[goran 9]

I guess so. Wake up interval is set to 21600. I know that they all have a good connection to HC2 as temperature is reported continously and correctly. If it would never wake up automatically in 200+ days, wouldn't it be reasonable to get an indication of this in HC2? I have monitoring scripts that make sure that temperatures and humidity reports from all my devices are updated on a regular basis just to be sure that they work. I really think that this should be taken care of by HC2 though.

[Even75 2]

Had the same problem on one of my smoke sensors. Battery completely drained after 5 months with standard settings. No battery warning or other warnings. Only noticed dead battery when trying to do a self test of the smoke sensor (no idea how long it was out of battery). Replaced battery with new one, which only lasted 3 weeks before showing low battery (when waking up smoke sensor manually). Not to impressed with these smoke sensors, as they do not seem very reliable. Fibaro replied to my post, but never got an answer on the real question. (See my original post here;

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)

[goran 9]

Great...

As a side note I looked at the settings for all my other smoke sensors and one of them had "0" as wake up interval.

I have never ever set this value to 0 at any time. I guess this is yet another thing I have to monitor for all devices.

 

I've reported to Fibaro many many times about devices having non-default settings after a fresh reset/include, even for brand new devices.

This includes some Smoke sensor having a disabled smoke alarm function after a new install. You would think that this should be considered a pretty serious bug but obviously not, as this still happens for some devices. I installed a new Fibaro Relay switch a few days ago for example, and pretty much all parameters were different than the ones marked as default.

 

By now I have written a whole bunch of monitoring scripts just to monitor that the monitoring system (HC2) does what it is supposed to.

If it continues like this my scripts will soon pretty much be able to replace HC2 entirely.

[Even75 2]

On some devices I can live with minor bugs, but for security equipment like the smoke sensors, I can't. If not fixed soon, I will have to look for alternatives to these smoke sensors, or maybe add these to a secondary controller (already ordered, and no, it will not be a Fibaro controller) when this function is working properly again.

[Even75 2]

Goran, any chance you could share your script for checking the batteries?