Power Consumption kills Battery

We have the Pepwave MAX Br1 installed in our fleet. We have it wired so it works with the ignition off and we can locate the vehicle. If the vehicle sits overnight, it’s fine. However, when the vehicle sits over the weekend, the battery will be dead. Our Test Vehicle has a new battery. The question is, can we reduce the power when the vehicle isn’t being used or has is not getting any WIFI traffic from the tablet? The tablet is the only device allowed to connect to the modem, via mac address, and the lan/wan ports are disabled.

Turning wifi off at the weekend when the vehicle isn’t used would lower power consumption - you can do that with a schedule on the device.

Still, I would suspect it to sit at around the 300-500ma mark at idle so worse case consuming 24Ah of battery capacity in a 48hr period.

You might consider installing an auxiliary battery and charge controller to isolate the BR1 from the engine battery completely.

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Can’t you just “automatically” turn off the BR1 after it is not in use for a while?

We’ve been responsible for the installation of such devices as this … Power Management Solutions - Auto Shut-Off Timers | Havis Inc NRL … in hundreds of public safety and utility vehicles. There are several such devices on the market and the one I’ve referenced has gone through some ownership changes. But the principal is simple: When the device no longer senses charging voltage (e.g., around 13.7VDC, adjustable) it starts a timer (also adjustable). When the timer expires the output is cut off.

So, suppose a vehicle is in use throughout the day with many engine starts/stops. The Peplink remains on. But, when the workday is over or the weekend starts, the Peplink’s supply power is terminated. It’s an inexpensive solution that “just works.” No fiddling required. :sunglasses:

Hello @Vic,
I’ve a couple of other solutions for you to add in addition to @MartinLangmaid & @Rick-DC thoughts.

#1 Keeping it with the MAX BR1
The MAX BR1 has an I/O interface on it, this could be used as an ignition sensor combined with a preset time (say ignition turns off, turn off Wi-Fi after 10 minutes and then turn off cellular after 96 hours (4 days), turn both back on when ignition turned on).

#2 Get a DC Battery protector
A DC Battery protector senses the level of the batter and will disconnect the battery form the device if it drops below a predefined threshold, ensuring there is enough charge kept to start the car.

We run a MAX BR1 in our own personal cars connected directly across the battery with no modifications and no ignition sense, it can be parked for a week when we are away travelling and it will still not flatten the car battery, this is only a small car batter too.

Can I ask, have you actually had a battery go flat that you can attribute to the BR1 yet?
Happy to Help,
Marcus :slight_smile:

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According to our calculations, it shouldn’t be enough to draw the battery down to the point the vehicle will not start. However, when it happened on the first vehicle we installed, the service department checked it and replaced the battery. The next Monday, the vehicle wouldn’t turn over again and it wouldn’t release the key to take it out.

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I misstated that we can find the vehicle. However, when the modem shuts down, you cannot locate the vehicle. So, we would rather not shut down the GPS portion of the modem. I will look into shutting down the WIFI portion. We are an Ambulance company so just turning the modem off for the weekend won’t work since we don’t know when the unit will be called into service.

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I will look at #1. #2 appears to come in at around $18K to outfit all our vehicles. Thanks.

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How many vehicles?

Not suggesting you schedule the powering off of the entire router - just the WiFI AP in the router. So Cellular module (& GPS) will stay online and still publish live location data.

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I would recommend a voltage sensitive relay.
When the voltage drops (i.e. alternation stops producing power) a timer starts, set the timer to say 5 hours and then the power is killed to the Pepwave.
Next time the vehicle is started, the alternation starts producing power and the relay kicks back in allowing the Pepwave to boot up.
If its less than your set time, the Pepwave will remain on.

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