Hello, I am creating a new post to try to make progress on the battery reporting issues with Ikea devices. Since the release of the first Ikea products compatible with Homey, there has been an issue with the battery level reporting on motion sensors, door/window sensors, remotes, etc. I have already exchanged over 5 emails with support, and the response is always the same: “We are aware of the issue, but we have other priorities. The problem will be addressed later.” Fine, but it’s been a year now that I’ve been getting this answer. So, I’ve just sent a new email to support now that they have finished and released the Dashboard. The reason I am making this post is to encourage others who are facing the same issue to send an email to support as well, so we can push for progress. The more of us there are, the higher the chance that this problem will be fixed. Thank you for your support!
I received a response from support, which unfortunately is not very positive (see below). Apart from setting an alert every 4 months to change the batteries, I don’t know what else to do, as I believe there will never be any follow-up from Homey support regarding Ikea devices. If anyone has a workaround to get battery status updates, I’m open to suggestions.
Good morning,
Thank you for reaching out to our support!
We are indeed aware that several IKEA battery devices have trouble displaying an accurate battery level and have even elected to
adjust the setting for battery alarms to be disabled automatically with a warning that not all devices report their status accurately when
enabling this option.
Although our development team are still looking into this matter, it is not easy to find a solution at our end because it seems that often
the device itself fails to send the data to update its battery status.
You can check this by going to the developer tools at Homey Developer Tools
In this device list you can check for the device data. If you see that other capabilities (like motion) have updated normally and only battery level has a long time since any report. It would point to the fact that the sensor itself might be having issues reporting the data to Homey. Since other data like motion is being reported we can confirm there is a working connection to the device, the device is simply not reporting data. In that case there does not seem much we can do to alter this, because the device
itself is at fault.
It still has our attention though and if a solution can be found at our end, it will be part of a future update and will probably get an announcement because it has been an issue which has been reported a very long time ago without a suitable solution.
For now this is all I can do for you, which is why I’m closing your ticket.
I wish you a great day and a lot of fun with Homey!
There are various workarounds available (see this z2m issue) that Athom can implement. This is about Parasoll but it probably applies to other devices too.
The issue doesn’t seem to be that the device stops sending updates, the issue is that the device isn’t sending an updated value, which is something different (internally, Homey doesn’t track the time it received an value update, it tracks the time it received a value change; if it receives a value but the value isn’t different from the previous value, it’s not recorded as being an update).
The device basically keeps on sending the battery level from when it was booted up, and you have to poll the device explicitly to make it send the current battery level, although the last comment in that thread suggests that setting a particular binding also seems to solve the issue.
