Heltec Capsule Sensor v3 (temperature sensor) battery empty within 3 hours

Hi there,

I recently purchased a Heltec capsule sensor v3 to monitor temperature and humidity in my garden, which is approximately 2-3 kilometers away from my home. Although I’m aware that the ESP32-S3 microcontroller used in this sensor isn’t the most power-efficient option available, the website claims that it can transmit up to 6000 LoRa packages before running out of battery. I installed Meshtastic 2.7.15 on the sensor and configured it as a sensor within the Meshtastic app. I disabled the LED heartbeat and Wi-Fi functions.

I intended to transmit environmental data every 30 minutes, so I estimated that the battery would last around 2 months (48 packages of environmental data and 48 packages of device metrics equate to 96 packages daily, which translates to approximately 62 days). This duration seemed sufficient for my needs. However, I was a bit skeptical because some reviews on Reddit mentioned that the battery doesn’t last a day, but all of those reviews were for location tracking purposes. Since I would only be using the sensor for temperature monitoring, I didn’t expect it to be that power-consuming. Unfortunately, even when only using the temperature sensor, the battery doesn’t last more than 3 hours.

I double-checked the device settings in the app. It’s set up as a sensor and the rebroadcast mode is set to None. The Meshtastic app mentions that there’s a power-saving option, but I can’t find it in the app.

Eventhough this device does not have a display, I set the display timeout to fifteen seconds because somewhere it states that the display timeout determines when a Meshtastic device enters into sleep mode. Nothing works. I cannot get more than 3 hours of battery life.

Is there any setting I might have overlooked? The only thing I can think of is disabling Bluetooth on the sensor, but I doubt it will provide me with a couple of weeks more battery life.