When a battery-powered Z-Wave device wakes up and turns on its radio, it uses 10,000 times more battery power than when it’s asleep. The entire trick to making batteries last is to minimize the amount of time the device is awake, which minimizes the number of times the sensor has to communicate to your gateway.
Things to do to optimize the battery lifetime:
- Set the Wake Up Interval to no more than once per hour and ideally only a few times per day
- Every hub assigns the WakeUpInterval differently and largely handles it behind the scenes, making it difficult to verify or change.
- If the device is waking up every few minutes and sends a sensor reading, its battery life is seriously shortened.
- The battery level of the device is usually reported at the WakeUpInterval rate.
- Turn off polling
- Because polling means that the gateway is asking the sensor about its ‘status’, by turning off polling, you shorten the time that the gateway and the sensor communicate, optimizing the battery lifetime.
