Do I want to intercept Home Assistant that much? It’s only the head system.
- 1st stage device firmware: expect nothing
- 2nd stage zigbee coordinator: next earliest stage possible
- 3rd stage smart home system: a bit late
Today one sensor again created those -100 ° values:
The last time the battery was changed was on 2022-04-23. So pretty exactly 8 months of battery life. Interesting:
- battery was shown as 95 %
- battery had 2.99 V (measured with a multimeter)!
I’m not into electronics, but 2.99 V is not even close to “empty”, right?
My summary:
- Percentage is TOTAL CRAP. Some months ago I adjusted my battery warnings for all Aqara devices to “< 70 %”. Well, see above - even on 95 % this -100 ° bug is triggered. I nowadays tend to say “don’t rely on Aqara battery percentage sensors AT ALL”. Would be great to have the actual voltage instead. I guess this is not exposed from the devices to deCONZ, is it?
- For now I see the -100 ° bug as indicator of a “not perfectly well” battery. Not an empty one. There might be days to even weeks (depending on the environment - especially cold areas - and the update intervals) until the battery really dies.
- I hope deCONZ can and will do sth. about this to filter those -100 ° values. I will then loose this “indicator” and suffer from Inacceptable huge default "sensor unavailable time" of 24 hours (so I only know about a REALLY dead battery 24 hours after it died), but this will save me about 1 to 1,5 hours per device/incident (because wiping out those -100 ° values from the Home Assistant database takes quite some time!). So in the end: please get rid of those wrong values in deCONZ!
Follow-up on https://forum.phoscon.de/t/its-time-to-fix-aqara-battery-bug/2368/14: is this confirmed to work? E. g. @Smanar did you write this from the top of your head (theory) or do you use this already?
It sounds like a pretty good approach as it would
a) work immediately (no need to wait for PRs, new updates and their shipment)
b) allow individual users to suppress the -100 ° values by choice.