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Enormous battery comsumption?
Hi folks,
I received my twine last week. As I wanted to use it with the vibrating sensor to signal the end of the washing machine run, I have to play a bit until the update.
Now it only lay on the table with a simple flip-over rule set up, the batteries are signaling low-battery after only 4 days! That is much to heavy! I think the problem is, that my WiFi-network is powered down during the night. So the twine is trying to connect all the time and this drains the power.
A rule for setting the twine to sleep-mode for a period of time would solve this.
Regards, Marc
I received my twine last week. As I wanted to use it with the vibrating sensor to signal the end of the washing machine run, I have to play a bit until the update.
Now it only lay on the table with a simple flip-over rule set up, the batteries are signaling low-battery after only 4 days! That is much to heavy! I think the problem is, that my WiFi-network is powered down during the night. So the twine is trying to connect all the time and this drains the power.
A rule for setting the twine to sleep-mode for a period of time would solve this.
Regards, Marc
Answers
I put new batteries in and set it on my desk to observe, and the bright white LED seems to come on now and then. I suspect this is related to the problem.. no idea what it's doing when the LED cycles. System reset?
To be practical, the Twine needs some kind of super-low "drop off WiFi and wait for inputs" state. I'm fine with it dissociating from WiFi until it has something to say.
I posted somewhere earlier that I had problems first setting up that I traced to the batteries that were shipped with Twine. Replaced them and no problem.
Does having the web page open and refreshing cause the Twine to use more power? I had a script that pinged it every 30 seconds. I wonder if that drained it too.
Today (Sunday) I got a low battery warning and it's reading 2.66v
The Twine is set up 1 floor down from the Wi-Fi AP, and is face-up with no external sensors attached. It's a modern house, so the signal isn't having to go through a lot of thick stone etc.
At this rate I'm expecting my Twine to die within another 3 days. 7 days for a set of batteries is, obviously, not acceptable.
I'm sure this is just a simple software bug- the Twine must not be going to sleep properly- when I go to the web control panel I generally get a reading from the unit within a couple of seconds. It does claim to be reducing the update rate after a while, but I'm betting it never manages to actually do that.
I'm using WPA2 Personal security on the 2.4GHz band that the Twine is connected to.
I'm going to try deleting my rules (I just had some test rules watching the temperature) and see if the rate of drain changes.
Netgear with DD-WRT software, WPA2. Battery consumption ok.
Regards - Don
While connected to the magnetic switch on rechargeable batteries I would typically get 1-2 days before the twine was completely unresponsive. Less than 24 hours would pass between the low battery alert and the unresponsiveness. The switch would only be opened about once a day by me to make sure it was still working. The temperature rule was also in effect this whole time and would be triggered a couple times a day.
Now I've been running the twine on another fully charged set of rechargeables and without any external sensor. This time the batteries lasted about a week with about 72 hours between the low battery alert and unresponsiveness.
During both of these test runs I saw a lot of LED activity when it seems that nothing was happening. My WiFi was working fine, the temperature was stable, and the switch wasn't moving. On my next battery change I may just delete all 2 of the rules that I have stored and see if twine lasts any longer. This seems a bit silly though.
Then I replaced the batteries, plugged in the mag switch, added an open/close rule, and updated the rules a few times as I waffled between wanting to receive the notifications via email or text (I settled on using Boxcar, turns out that this is nice for getting near-instant push notifications without eating up your monthly SMS allotment). I installed the Twine in my mailbox, so I could get alerts when the box was opened. The batteries lasted a day.
Yesterday I replaced the batteries again, and deleted the temp rule. The batteries are now down to 2.85v about 26 hours later. I suspect that temp monitoring may be the culprit in my case. I'll grant that I don't know how temp monitoring works under the covers, but if it's having to check the temp on an interval, compare that to the rule, and then decide whether not to report the change, I have to imagine that consumes more power than simply not bothering to check the temp outside of whatever schedule it's talking on by default.
>To be practical, the Twine needs some kind of super-low "drop off WiFi and wait
>for inputs" state.
>I'm fine with it dissociating from WiFi until it has something to say.
I think the idea is specifics to the company go there, and we take the answers back and share with the community.
I gave up on batteries and just use AC USB and found the twine much more reliable.
Do they have the vibration sensor working yet or is it still just the dumb which way is up?