So, it’s finally time to retire my field test Hub/Air/Sky units. I had been waiting for the Air to finally run out of batteries but it just won’t seem to die!! It’s been live since the beginning with the original set of batteries still installed. Never reset, never opened, it just keeps on going and going and going (insert mental image of the Energizer Bunny). It has been live for 620 days and still shows 3.43V for battery level! I’d say the engineers at WF have done a tremendous job with the power saving circuitry on the Air. I’m guessing this might be (one of?) the longest serving AIR devices ever!
I’m retiring the original hardware and passing the torch to its younger siblings (production units who have been running in parallel for months) and to reduce some traffic on my network.
FWIW, my Air unit AR-00004424 has been running for 619 days now as well on the original batteries, which are reading 3.06 volts at about freezing outside. It went wonky about 4 months ago and restarted itself several times, but appears to be up and stable again for almost three months now. I’m letting it run to see how long the batteries last at this point…
I haven’t taken the batteries out of it yet. I just unplugged the original hub to cut down on network traffic. I’ll check back in on it in a couple of months to see if it’s still alive.
With the hub unplugged will the AIR keep trying to connect and thus run the battery down faster? If so, just change the WiFi settings in the hub and you can check through Bluetooth at any time.
I guess I could try that (i.e. don’t give it a WiFi to connect to). I just want to get it off of the LAN to prevent the UDP port 50222 broadcasts that are clogging up my monitoring software.
