Solution: Is Your Schlage Wifi Lock requiring frequent battery Changes with a Mesh Router?

Support
1

I have a Schlage Wifi Lock and an Orbi Mesh Router System.

Schlage states batteries should last 6 months. I was lucky to get a month. Schlage said to use Duracell or Energizer only and that did not help.

On many Mesh Routher Systems you can only broadcast 1 SSID but due to beam forming, it can switch between 2.4 and 5 GHZ randomly. In most cases you can not name the SSID for 2.4 and 5 GHZ differently.

Schlage is 2.4 GhZ and when your router switches, the locks come out of low power mode and try to find the 2.4 signal and can’t. This burns batteries as its not in low power mode anymore

You can turn off beam forming. But this negates a feature of Mesh systems.

I bought a Access Point. You can get a 2.4 Ghz only one for 14 dollars on Amazon. I plugged it with an ethernet cable to the Orbi Satellite and turned off 5ghz. I named the SSID Schlage. Then I switched my locks wifi to that SSID which should not lose connection and therefore extend battery life.

I’ll report back to update.

Schlage and all other home automation manufacturers that use battery and wifi should make their devices with the ability to switch between 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz, but they probably won’t

2 Likes
2

Would it be too much trouble to ask for you to look at how often the locks were dropping off Wi-Fi 6 days ago when I posted this vs how much since I posted this when I made the change for it to lock onto. Constant 2.4 ghz SSID.? I also plan on reporting back after a month (when it normally runs out of battery) and after many months (hopefully). Just a bit impatient and hoping you saw lots of drop offs before I posted to no drop offs since after the OP

Thanks in advance.

3

If the lock is frequently dropping connection and reconnecting repeatedly to wifi, we do not have visibility into that.

In your account history there are malfunction reports when signals are not going through to the lock. The last malfunction report for the Schlage locks was on 7/25.

Other recent malfunction events were 7/14/2025 7/11/2025 7/10/2025 7/8/2025 7/2/2025 6/28/2025.

4

This is strange. This was not even on my radar as I was more trying to identify wifi disconnects.

What do you think could be causing the malfunctions? What does malfunction specifically mean?

What’s even more odd is had you not told me this, I would never know as everything seems to be working perfectly.

Do other users show that many malfunctions suggesting its just part of the way things are or maybe the reporting is too broadly categorized?

5

That malfunction condition is just a result of the device being unreachable for commands intermittently. It can easily be caused by wifi disconnections for a wifi device like the encode locks.

It can be caused by low power levels in some devices, etc. It is a general status, it doesn’t indicate any specific cause, just the effect of the device missing some communication.