With most modern alarm systems now being wireless, many people are justifiably worried about how long the batteries will last and whether they’ll be constantly replacing batteries in all their detectors. Now just to explain that a little bit further, obviously being a wireless system, there’s no wires connecting the sensors to the control panel.

So there’s no way that the control panel can directly feed electricity to power the sensors. So the sensors are powered with batteries, and obviously as I say, people are concerned about how long batteries will last. Now I’m always a bit cynical with manufacturers battery life claims. Manufacturers, test their batteries in ideal laboratory conditions.

Now none of us live in a laboratory, we all live in a house or a flat or whatever, and those conditions aren’t perfectly ideal. So battery usage is always higher in a house than it is in a lab. So I always take manufacturer’s claims with a little bit of pinch of salt.

I reckon that you’ll get somewhere between two thirds to three quarters of the manufacturer’s claim. So if a manufacturer says their batteries will last four years, then under normal usage, I reckon you’ll probably get two and a half to three years out of a battery. Now the exception to that rule is potentially the alarm siren.

If the alarm system doesn’t go off, then fine, you’ll get your two thirds to three quarters battery life out of the batteries. But of course if the alarm goes off causing the siren to make its noise, then that obviously is a much greater drain on the battery and so it won’t last quite so long.

So that’s the only kind of exception to that. With more modern systems, they’ve got some quite clever battery saving technology built into them. Now if you liken it to talking to people, now if you’re at a party and you’re talking to someone who’s a metre away from you, you don’t have to talk very loud for them to hear you.
If you’re trying to call or talk to someone who’s on the other side of the room, you might have to raise your voice a little. If you’re trying to communicate with someone who’s on the other side of a field or something, then you’re going to really have to shout at them.

And it’s the same with, this battery saving technology. There’s communication between the control panel and the detector, and the control panel says well I’m getting this signal loud and clear, don’t use so much battery, or it might say I’m only just getting this signal.

Please make sure you use as much battery as possible to make the signal as loud as possible when it’s communicating backwards. So a detector or a sensor that’s only metre or so away from the control panel doesn’t need to use nearly so much power to power its radio signal back to the control panel and if it’s not using as much power the battery will last a lot lot longer.

The manufacturers claim that the batteries will last up to eight years so using my old cynical rule of thumb I think you’ll probably get five six maybe six and a half years use out of a battery where the sensor is a lot further away and the signal is having to come through walls and floors and things like that which are going to deplete the signal then still your two and a half to three years is a reasonable expectation so I hope that answers that question for you.