Pretty much all door locks have apps which will tell you weeks in advance to change the batteries. I have a Schlage that has been rocking 4AA batteries for over 2 years.
In my world, AA batteries are all about door locks. There are a lot of card-reading door locks that depend on them.
Whenever a lock fails, step one or two or three is replace the batteries. That's 4-6 batteries per lock.
As a maintenance/security procedure, once every couple of years, every battery in every lock in the entire building is replaced. Doesn't matter if they are dead, weak or brand new. That's hundreds/thousands of batteries.
That's a lot of batteries. And Duracell has multiple levels of "pro"/"industrial grade" batteries. We buy them by the case.
I'm sure the markup on consumer batteries are huge, but I'd also think the commercial use of double-As must dwarf the consumer market. Smart buy by Warren is my guess.
What's needed in this space is a door lock that winds itself much like a "perpetual" watch. Something that takes the mechanical energy used to turn the door handle and turns it into stored energy that can be used to read the card and unbolt the door.
> But unless these units are battery-driven, I see more complexity in just getting the silly things wired up
Opening/closing the vent very occasionally shouldn't require more than some AA batteries in each vent. Lithium batteries ($5-8 for a 4-pack) would last months or even years. I have some powering the keypad & deadbolt on my front door, which is both remote controllable like these vents would be, and has to operate a motor to turn the bolt, and it's rated for 1-2 years use on a single set of batteries.
how does a hotel not go bankrupt replacing thousands of batteries all the time?
A microcontroller in sleep state (or similar) draws extremely low power, micro or nano Amps. It only wakes up when it sees data on the card reader, reads the card reader data, and decides if it should open the lock. The motor that unlocks the door only runs for less than a second. Then the whole thing goes back into sleep state.
Hotel doors are only opened 10s of times per day, at most. A pair of couple Amp-hour batteries will last quite a while. Maybe replace them once a year. Tech with an electric screw driver maybe takes 1 minute per door, even a 600 room hotel only costs 2 days of labor once per year (max 1 week, if the tech is slow). That's not that expensive. And the tech's time is 10x the cost of the batteries, coin cells in bulk are dirt cheap.
If you care about an alkaline battery powered item, it's in your interests to change the batteries once a year --- it's the easiest way to avoid battery leakage.
Batteries that last for months or years for portable electronics.
That's a multi billion dollar solution if anyone can manage it. Battery tech has definitely not stagnated - it is just maddeningly hard to progress.
Even the most modern car out there (arguably, the latest generation Toyota Prius) is still a mess of gears, oil, wires, and fairly crappy and old UI conventions on the inside
The reason that "mess" has survived relatively unchanged for so long is simple: it "just works". It works really well and is simple. Changing a winning formula is tough.
Better locks for my home
We have digital locks at work and they are the biggest pain ever :) again there is a reason we have keys - they work.
Milwaukee is still selling their nicad batteries, if you were in that platform before. The big brands (and this includes Ryobi, etc) do not change their batteries much at all.
The smaller brands like Craftsman and "store brands" seem to change relatively randomly.
"duracell" cr2032s -- those little pancake batteries for your car keyfob -- that die within 4 months. Which is weird, because the duracells at my hardware store last like 5 years.
For that I use Klikaan/Klikuit, I have a whole bunch of these set up throughout the house and they're pretty easy to use and configure. Outside of NL these are sold under the 'Intertechno' brand. Batteries seem to last forever, I've had these in the house for five years now and never had to change a single battery.
reply