I noticed my S5 max really uses a considerable amount of power doing "nothing". In 12 hours it will go from fully charged to ~60%. Thats an astonishing amount of power just to keep the wifi on? I can almost clean my entire house with that same charge, and I have wifi devices that run off a coin cell for months.
I believe it will turn itself off or go in to a deep sleep after a day or so, but thats not helpful when you use it almost every day, as it never goes in to any deep sleep state.
Some background; I dont like li-on batteries being kept at 100% (it degrades the batteries and increases the risk of fires) and I dont like wasting electricity so I put the dock in a smart socket that I control with a home automation platform. My idea was to turn off the dock whenever the battery reached >80%, and turn on the dock whenever the battery dropped below 60% or when a cleaning job is upcoming within an hour, or when it is cleaning -so it can always find the dock.
While this works fine, I was shocked at how often it kept turning the dock on and off, so I thought it might be that my turning on/off of the dock interfered with sleep modes. But that doesnt seem to explain it, as I fully charged it, then turned off the dock, and 12 hours later, almost half the charge is gone.
A back of the envelope balll park estimate (based on 5200mAH, 16.4V nomimal charge battery ) tells me it draws somewhere around 3W. That isnt going to ruin me financially, but its more than my raspberry Pi under max load and millions of such vacs, thats a lot of wasted electricity. Roborock, surely you can do better ? Are you still powering the laser, or what is draining the battery so quickly? If this cant be solved fundamentally, can we get some control over sleep mode ? Like how long it takes to enter it, and ideally, I would be able to instruct it to go off / sleep mode (via the API), and if it cant be woken via wifi, wake it up by turning on the charger again.
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edit/update. It does seem to turn off after 12 hours, and this time it was at ~70%. Once in sleep mode or off? there is no noticeable battery decrease, and reapplying power to the dock wakes it up. So all I need really is for it to enter sleep mode a lot sooner, or on command.
Dear customer,
Usually, we suggest customers put device on dock all the time if it is used every week. After battery is fully charged, only mother board of device is charged and customers don't need worry battery is fully charged for a long time and may decrease the lifespan. Besides,it doesn't cost much electricity even if it is put on dock for a long time.
The device will turn off auto without any operation after 24 hours if it is not on dock and customers have to manually hold power button to turn on it, which is not convenient if it is often used.
Of course, we still suggest customers turn off device if it will not be used for several weeks.
And usually it is not suggested to use a smart socket, since the charging dock could be sufficient. May we suggest you try a standard socket to see if the smart socket is the cause?
FYI, from my testing, it didnt take 24 but ~11 hours for my S5 max to shut down:
You can see it was fully charged, then I turned off the dock, then it kept discharging until ~70% in about 11 hours (not entirely sure what that first tiny bump is, perhaps just a measurement error) and then the line goes flat, thats where it shut down automatically and I stopped receiving battery data.
The second, larger bump after the flat line is where I turned back on the socket the next morning, the machine woke itself when I did that; there is no need to press the power button to wake it. Unfortunately, the power button -or waiting 12 hours- seems to be only way to turn it off. Im not sure yet if it ever turns itself off if you dont unplug it or press the button. But it certainly takes more than 11 hours then, and more than 2 days.
The smart socket can not possibly be the source of the problem, because it was turned off, no different than if I had unplugged it.
As for the power consumption; 30% in half a day is quite a lot for "doing nothing". Assuming it never turns off as long as its in the dock and the dock plugged in the wall, and you vacuum once a week, this means you waste 2x30% x 7 days = 420%, so 4-5x more energy from standby mode than from actually cleaning.
Its not a huge absolute number, Im sure it still uses less than a traditional vacuum, but it seems so wasteful. It may even violate EU regulations regarding standby power.
Lastly, regarding life span, you have that wrong. A fully charged li-on battery is bad for lifespan. A fully discharged battery too (even worse). Ideally you keep the battery around 50% for storage (which is the voltage you ship your vacuums at btw), but even keeping it at 80-90% instead of 100% makes a real difference. And thats exactly what Im doing here, and something you could also implement in software: charge only to 90%, unless a scheduled clean is coming up. Tesla does it like that with their cars, they charge to 90% by default, unless you ask it to charge to 100% when you are planning a long trip. Tesla also do that for longevity.
Now this battery is cheaper to replace than the one of a tesla, but hey, if you can avoid it with a few lines of code, why not?
Thank you for your feedback about the issue, we're going to forward it to our tech department and hope they could improve it in future. For further information or support, you're welcome to contact our support@roborock-eu.com, Thank you.