Yesterday I noticed the battery on my Remote 3 getting low quicker than usual. By 18:00 it was down to about 15%.
I charged it overnight so it was at 100% when I got up but it’s already dropped 11% in about an hour. Surely that’s not normal? I’ve got the Home Assistant integration setup so I’ve grabbed this graph from HA:
I do have my remote set to not go to sleep when there’s an activity running. I know that’s not helping the battery life but it’s better than having to wait 10 seconds for the remote to wake up before I can pause what I’m watching or change the volume.
Other things I have set - display timeout after 10 seconds, 1 minute sleep timeout (I know that’s not really doing anything), display brightness at 10% & button backlight at 20%.
I read that there’s a new Wi-Fi firmware coming that’ll be better on the battery but what can I do to try and get the battery lasting a full day? My main reason for moving away from my Harmony Ultimate was that the battery was pretty much on it’s last legs but it’s actually better than the UC3 so I may dig the Harmony out and use that instead.
Is there anything else I should do to try and eek more life out of the battery?
Sorry to say but with prevent sleep active around 12%/h is normal. My remotes lasts a whole day even at the weekend because I put it in a charger (Dock or wireless) when not used for a longer time.
Had I always had that same level of battery drain then I wouldn’t have posted but there’s definitely increased drain compared to when I got the remote. I definitely didn’t need to charge the remote within 12 hours of taking if off the dock until very recently.
Thinking about it, I wonder if the increased drain came along with software v2.6.9. I’ll have a look through the HA history and see.
My usage of the remote hasn’t changed, as far as I know since I got it. No new integrations for sure but I wonder if integration updates are contriburing.
I’ll have a look at the load average, it’s worth seeing if high CPU load is leading to higher power draw.
I’ve got it set so that it won’t sleep when there’s an activity running to avoid having to wait up to 10 seconds for the remote to wake before I can pause/change volume. I know that’ll negatively impact battery life.
I grabbed some data from HA and can see that on the previous firmware (I forgot the version number) it’d use about 9%/hour so there or thereabouts to what I’m seeing now.
The data also showed that usage yesterday isn’t typical, on previous weekends there’s been periods of a few hours where the remote has gone to sleep because there wasn’t an activity running. Yesterday there was an activity running pretty much all day.
I do still find the battery life to be very poor but the %/hour hasn’t changed so what I noticed yesterday was based on higher usage.
They wait for a new firmware for the WiFi chip from the chip manufacturer that fixes issues with keeping the WiFi connection enabled during sleep mode so you don’t need to enable prevent sleep for activities and have less wait time for re connection. This already works with the R2.
I think it would be helpful to add an option that caps charging at a maximum of 80%, similar to what many smartphones and PCs offer today. I’ve submitted a feature request to implement this functionality. Please like the feature request below if you feel this is important to preserve the battery life:
