Ooma Forums

The RMA is for magnetic sensors, not motion.

Tom, any idea about the timing of the release for this big update to solve all of these bugs?

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=21081 Your telo is now on this release. Additional issues related to battery life are fixed in the next release.

>My Ademco (Honeywell) motion sensors use the CR123A battery and the batteries last about 7 years. When the motion sensor detects motion it then goes to sleep for three minutes to preserve battery life.

I was just talking to a friend of mine who also has an Ademco system with wireless sensors. The reason the battery lasts so long in the Ademco is that it operates at 300MHz and only reports in once per hour unless tripped. The Ademco control unit doesn't report a disconnected sensor for 12 hours. The Ooma sensors operate on 2.1-2.8 GHz in the unlicensed PCS band and report in every 5 minutes and 40 seconds. They transmit with 65 mW of power (about one-fifth of what a cellphone transmits with) Ooma reports a sensor disconnected if it doesn't hear from it for 45 minutes and the motion detector does go to sleep for two minutes after detecting motion.

Even more interesting is the Ooma sensors use an RF chip made by Cross Technology-an outfit located in Israel!! It's amazing what you can discover by looking up the FCC ID for a radio device. Ha ha!

The quick drain of the batteries seems to be random. One of my door sensors ate up 2 Duracell Quantum (their premium brand) batteries in just 2 weeks!! The voltage of the batteries when removed was 1.1v. When this happened I checked the batteries in all the other door sensors and they all were about 1.55v. I've had no issues (luckily) with my 3 motion detectors so far eating batteries but I wonder if they will last a year or more as advertised... I rather doubt if the door/window sensor batteries will last a year as the batteries were over 1.6v when they were installed just a month ago indicating quite a drain. Please speed up the software update that addresses this as batteries are expen$ive!!!

I have used AAA alkaline batteries in my Ooma door and window sensors for years without any issues.
Because of the alkaline battery leakage issues in some of my other electronic devices, I decided to switch to AAA lithiums.
The very first time I installed AAA lithiums in one of my Ooma sensors, it failed immediately. I removed the lithiums and installed alkaline batteries but the sensor was dead. Everyone in the electronics industry knows that a new AAA lithium battery will measure 1.7 volts, not 1.2 volts as stated by Tom. I concluded that the device was not designed to support the 3.4 volts supplied by 2 lithium batteries. For this reason I will never install AAA lithium batteries in my Ooma sensors again. Before someone ask if I installed the batteries correctly, I'm a retired aerospace electronics circuit designer with over 60 years experience and a lab full of test equipment. I have also found that the lithiums when used in my Dish Network remotes have a strange way of failing. When the remote quits working, I remove the batteries and they will still have a no-load voltage of 1.7 volts but they will not work in the remote. The only explanation I can find for this symptom is that the batteries develop a high impedance causing the loaded voltage to drop when the remote buttons are pressed.

I put a date sticker on each sensor when I replace its batteries. My front door sensor (about 30' from the Telo) got new batteries on 8-16-2020 which is about 11 months ago. Other sensors have similar battery life.

Last time I checked the sensors sent an update pulse to the Telo about every 12 minutes. (I have an RF detector which allows me to know when a sensor transmits by placing it near the sensor).

The sensor is actually a two-way device which means it transmits and receives. The Telo can update the firmware on the sensor.

Something is definitely wrong if you are getting such poor battery life. My suspicion is that something is interfering with the signal or you have a problem with the Telo as all the sensors can't be bad.