August WiFi Smart Lock dies unexpectedly and jams

In mid April, my Gen 3 August Smart Lock failed and I ordered the only available replacement, the Augest WiFi Smart Lock (Gen 4).

On April 24, I installed it.

On June 10 (47 days), the lock showed unavailable in the App and when we went to it, it was jammed hard into the unlocked position and couldn't be operated manually. Removing and replacing the batteries had no effect (the device remained powered off). I measured the voltage on the batteries. One was at 2.0V, the other at 2.7V, well below their nominal output of 3V.

Called August and they recommended replacing the batteries. A trip to Target and $16 later, I replaced the batteries. New batteries read 3.2V on the voltmeter. Still I was unable to operate the lock manually. I was, however, able to operate the lock in the app, which unjammed the lock and allowed it to operate manually. I ran a calibration on it just for good measure.

Next day, called August support again and spoke to Estafany.

Low battery alert should at 25-30%, but there were no alerts.

Expected battery life is meant to be 2-3 months, but is affected by WiFi operation. Disabled WiFi in order to extend the life.

Suggests that the issue might be that we're not accessing the lock through the app via bluetooth frequently enough, even though we do access the app regularly via bluetooth (presumably) to enable and disable auto lock and also to auto unlock when arriving home.

June 9 was the last date that there was a bluetooth operation. Two operations (one lock, one unlock). They only have 30 days of activity history.

Estafany was able to share with me a chart they have of the battery history.

There we can see the battery level falls below 6V within the first week, hovers around 5.9 volts for 3-4 weeks, then drops to 5.4 volts in the last few weeks.

Yellow is state change. Red is auto-relock. Purple is "bridge battery log".

Interesting that there isn't any bridge batter log in the first 4 days or so. I'm guessing that's because it hadn't yet been enrolled with homekit (while I was working out other issues with the lock). Also interesting is there were a few voltage readings in the 6.5-7.5 range early on in its life, but with the most recent battery replacement, there was one reading at 6.5, but it's quickly dropped to 6V.

Confirmed that there's no battery level indicator in the app.

And confirmed that notifications are on.

Estafany has escalated the ticket to engineering to help answer the open questions:

- Why is there no way to monitor the battery level in the app?
- What is the voltage where a low battery warning will be emitted and why was no warning emitted here?
- Why did the batteries only last 47 days?
- Why did the lock die in a non-operational configuration?

They won't offer any compensation for the batteries as they lasted close to their expected life of 2-3 months (47 ~= 60-90 I guess). They advise to monitor the lock to see if it happens again.

No repository files, tests, or code entry points are identified. Start by reviewing the reported battery history and the four unanswered questions about monitoring, warning thresholds, battery life, and the jammed state; done would require a decided, reproducible scope and a way to verify the result.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.