Free planning tool

LoRaWAN Battery Life Calculator

How long a sensor lasts on one cell, what is draining it, and how often you can afford to transmit.

1 · Your device

The two things that decide everything else: how often it wakes, and how long it talks.

MacRay LU4 — ultrasonic level (sub-4 m) · uplink every 15 min

19.6years

Drained mostly by transmission (72% of the annual budget). Average draw 94 µA.

16.8µAh

Charge per uplink

35,040

Uplinks per year

16150mAh

Usable of 19,000

Only 85% of nameplate capacity is counted — the rest is stranded below the cut-off voltage or lost to cold and pulse losses. Self-discharge of 1%/year is charged separately.

Where the charge goes

One uplink costs 16.8 µAh

Transmit — 412 ms at SF1013.49 µAh80%
Sensor read2.50 µAh15%
MCU wake & processing0.67 µAh4%
Receive windows0.18 µAh1%

To hit your target

For 10 years, transmit no more often than every 6.4 min. Your 15 min setting is inside that.

Two ceilings apply. Quiescent draw of 5.0 µA plus 1%/year self-discharge would empty this cell in 20.0 years with no traffic at all — and separately, Li-SOCl₂ is only rated for about 20 years of service regardless of drain, so nothing here is quoted beyond that.

Life against uplink interval

Sending less often stops helping once sleep current dominates.

01121ceiling 20 yr — cell service life1m10m1h12huplink intervalyr

Cost of the spreading factor

At 15 min. A higher SF reaches further but stays on air longer.

SF12 stays on air 24× longer than SF7 for the same message. Put gateways where sensors can use a low SF and you buy battery life and capacity at the same time — plan that in the coverage calculator.

How these numbers are calculated

Charge budget — each uplink costs transmit current × time on air, plus the receive windows, the MCU wake and the sensor read. Multiply by uplinks per year, add quiescent draw across all 8,760 hours, add self-discharge, and divide into usable capacity.

Airtime — Semtech AN1200.13, including the 13-byte LoRaWAN header and the mandatory low-data-rate optimisation at SF11/SF12.

Radio figures come from the STM32WLE5 datasheet, the MCU in every Macnman LoRaWAN device — not from the product sheets. Transmit current follows ST's published curve (15 mA at +10 dBm, 45 mA at +14, 87 mA at +20, 118 mA at +22), receive is 5.4 mA and the MCU runs at about 4.8 mA. Sleep defaults to 5 µA: the part itself draws 1.07 µA in Stop2 with the RTC running, and a finished node adds a regulator, sensor front end and board leakage.

This disagrees with the product sheets on purpose. They quote “<100 µA in sleep” and “<50 mA during transmission”. Neither matches an STM32WLE5, and they are wrong in opposite directions — twentyfold too high on idle, 2.4× too low on each uplink — so a model built on them lands near the right answer for the wrong reasons and drifts badly as soon as the uplink interval changes. Sleep current is editable if you want to see the difference.

Service life is capped at 20 years. A charge budget alone will predict sixty. Li-SOCl₂ cells are rated by their makers for roughly 20–25 years, and a cell held at microamp drain for years grows a passivation layer that can dip the voltage when a transmit pulse hits. Long intervals make that more likely, not less.

Sensor read is an estimate — the current and duration of the sensing element are not on the specification sheets, so the defaults are typical values for each sensor technology: an NDIR CO₂ cell needs a warm-up and tens of milliamps, an RS485 soil probe must be powered and polled, a dry-contact input costs almost nothing. Both are editable under advanced settings. A sensor read is normally a small share of the budget next to transmit, so an error here moves the answer far less than the uplink interval does.

Only battery-operated LoRaWAN devices are listed — gateways are PoE powered and the MacSet controllers run from 230 V AC or 9–24 V DC, so none of them belong here. Wi-Fi, cellular and BLE products are excluded too: this model prices LoRa airtime by spreading factor, which does not describe how those radios spend energy.

Usable capacity — nameplate is derated because charge below the cut-off voltage is unreachable, and cold weather and pulse loads cost more. Li-SOCl₂ self-discharge is taken as 1%/year.

Checked against our own products — a MacRay LU4 on 19 Ah at 10-minute uplinks returns about 10 years, which is the figure its specification sheet already claims.

Planning estimates only. Real life depends on temperature, downlink traffic and how often the network asks the device to re-join.

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