Hi. I have an IQ4 with 50+ sensors: Door/Window, Motion, Smoke, CO, Water, Tilt, Doorbell, External Sirens, and key fobs.
Every sensor is 319.5MHz, and many are greater than 8 years ago.
My only battery issue has been the IQSmoke and CO detectors, at least for me they don’t last more than 2 years. While we were just away, I kept getting the daily offline then online message, and usually during the AM hours!
My new strategy may be to replace the batteries once per year and hopefully never worry about this again. I may also start the replacement of the batteries in the door and window sensors and maybe the water sensors as well.
As I’ve been deciding on my future strategy, I noticed that the new PowerG+ sensors actually report their battery status to the IQ4 but it states for “dealers”.
Few questions:
If I started to install PowerG+ sensors over time, will we have access to the report of the battery gauge information?
When will Surety start selling PowerQ+ sensors? I see them listed elsewhere.
Anything else I should consider?
Is there a way to mute the offline/online messages for a specific sensor while away. Every single day I got a message and many were in the AM hours.
Overall I’m thinking of upgrading for the future since it’s been almost 10 years since I started this journey. All thoughts welcome.
It would be great to have access to the battery info. The YouTube education video said it’s not an exact % number but would give a good indication when getting low.
My experience with the IQSmoke and CO detectors is they just start going offline and online randomly daily when the battery is at end of life. For now I will replace the batteries every year or two. They always last at least a year.
I may just replace all the batteries in every sensor at the start of the year, some are 8+ years, rather than upgrade to PowerG+, but then again I might just decide to replace one by one over time.
I need to look in that System Actions section. It might be ok to mute all sensor offline messages temporarily especially at night, it kept waking me up while away for the Holidays. The arm away would still be active.
Regarding battery level, this is viewable on the main panel.
On the main page, you will have the card with the tabs “Active” “All” and “Ambient.” On “All” it will show a battery symbol with some notches and color coded, green = full, orange = medium, red = low.