Sonos Roam - Battery drain

At the very least, can’t we have an option to automatically have the Roam turn itself off after 3 or 10 or X minutes of inactivity? I use it as a shower speaker and when you’re getting out and wet it’s damned hard to remember to do it manually. It’s a real bummer to realize I forgot to turn off a fully charged speaker and have it already dead the next day.

Hi @bn7yuki9 

The description of your problem sounds like it may be one of the times we need to fully investigate your Roam to confirm that there is a fault with it - if there is, we’ll gladly replace if for you. While hardware faults are rare, they are not unheard of, and no amount of advice given or followed will make any difference.

The chat saying that there are agents available means agents are currently working and being assigned chat cases. When you opt to join one, you are put in a queue (after going through the help supplied by the Sonos Assistant chatbot) and when an agent finishes with an existing chat, they will then be assigned the first chat in the queue. If you do not wait long enough for the agent to start chatting with you, we will get a transcript of your conversation with the chatbot and we will investigate the situation and email you assistance as soon as we can (generally within a day). For your particular case, however, I recommend a phone call.

While we can give as much help and advice as we can here on the forum, sometimes we just need to you to get in touch directly to move forward. You may think this is something that’s happening a lot because you see a few people posting here, but this forum covers support for 3 continents (plus literally anyone on the planet who speaks English) and we have sold many units. 

Same issue’s. It’s only good if you’re using with a charger plugged in or else it’s waste of money. Stay away. Battery won’t stay more than an hour at max and it will drain automatically even when it’s turned off.

Same Problem here and I see I am not the only one with this problem as to this and on other forum on the same “SONOS ROAM” this indicated there is QA - quality issues. 

My Battery Drains after 10 use after when it was fully charging the night before.

And Yes, I have fully powered off by holding the power button for 5 seconds as per instruction and no Led’s light were on indicating it was fully switched off. 

I contacted SONOS Tech Support and with no joy with an answer, and the phone conversation got disconnected from their end after I was placed on Hold as he was checking and never returned my call. very puzzled. Hope to reconnect with SONOS support tomorrow and hoping to get a resolution.

PS: Note: I used the SONOS ROAM “Wireless Charger” (the extra purchase) connected using its supplied lead and its supplied 3 pin power plug to the wall AC powerpoint for the charging.

Yep, I'm seeing this too. My Roam seems to always be low on battery when I grab it to listen to, which is extremely disappointing when people come over unexpectedly and we just want to put some tunes on in the garden. If a fix isn't released for this I'll be making a claim under the warranty. 

Same issues of very poor battery life on standby.

Sonos, you need to both acknowledge and fix this issue ASAP and respect your customers. There is a CLEAR issue and it needs to be addressed.

Interesting that none of the 'reviewers' (paid, influencers etc) experienced these real world issues!

Might be time to post my own YouTube 1 month test experiences.

Alternatively perhaps you need to start supplying this not-fit-for-purpose product with a wireless charging Dock as standard! Or at least retrospectively for customers who are experiencing these common issues.

I too may just consider returning it. 

Just echoing what everyone else is experiencing.

I got my Roam two days ago and yesterday I was surprised that the battery was down to 10% when it had just been on standby during the day and I was sure that the battery level was 100% when I disconnected the charger. 

Today I did a couple quick battery checks while using it and when I’ve had it on standby. I started on 100% when I took the speaker off the charger.

1. Played music, volume around 30%, for 30 minutes, the battery indicator still showed 98%. 
2. Stopped the music, put the speaker on standby (I assume that’s what’s happening when you stop playing music).
3. Checked the battery level 1 hour later, it had dropped to 91%.
4. Checked several times during the next hour with the speaker on standby, during this time the battery just dropped 1% down to 90%.
5. Came back after additional 2 hours of standby, now the battery was down to 84%. 

So the battery consumption while playing music is less, or at least equal, to the battery drain when the speaker is idle and on standby. Also the battery drain on standby appear to come in waves, it’s not an even drain, at least not for me.

Just during the 12 minutes it took me to write this (with the speaker on standby) the battery dropped from 84% to 82%, that’s equivalent of 10% per hour.

I’ve got Google Assistant turned on (and I won’t disable it.  )

This is my first Sonos purchase and introduction to the Sonos line of products. I have to say, I’m kind of disappointed.

I’m experiencing all of the same battery drain issues everyone else is experiencing.

A family member has a Move and Roam and told me that he said the battery drain via Airplay isn’t as bad on the Move. I’ve been trying this on the Roam on Airplay and noticed that the battery drain isn’t as awful. However, isn’t that the selling point of the device is that it’s a portable Sonos bluetooth speaker? It’s awful that I can only really enjoy the speaker in Airplay mode without it draining insanely fast.

Plus, I’m using Airplay via a laptop through the Spotify Desktop app...so, if I try to adjust the volume from my keyboard, it doesn’t work (i.e. it will adjust my laptop volume). I need to click back to the app every time to adjust volume on the Roam, which is a pain. I can go into “preferences” and set my audio output to Sonos Roam via Airplay, but it’s really buggy, very delayed in responsiveness (if it works at all), and defeats the purpose of using the “Connect A Device” feature in Spotify. Not sure if the latter part is a Spotify issue or Roam issue, but either way..I wouldn’t have to deal with this if I could simply connect via Bluetooth without drainage issues.

Also, why can’t I see the Roams charging percentage if I turn the device off completely? I get the device needs to be recognize by the app in order to locate the device to give you battery percentage, understood there...but if I have the Roam on my wireless charger, there’s no constant indicator light on the device itself that shows when it’s charging (orange) and when it’s completed (green). That seems like the simplest of functions. Instead, I need to turn the device back on (because we have to turn it off due to battery drain) just to see the percentage?

On top of it, the wireless charging dock has sometimes been a bit buggy too. For example, the Roam won’t show it’s charging in the app if it’s sitting right on the charger.

I was highly considering getting a home system from Sonos but after this experience, I’m not so sure.

Is it worth getting the Ones, Arc/Beam, Five, and/or Sub -OR- are these products just as buggy. Is it all smoke-and-mirrors?

 

Someone on Reddit claimed that the battery life is better on Bluetooth when Wi-Fi isn’t connected? This is because Wi-Fi uses more battery power than Bluetooth does - can anyone prove or confirm this?

If the Roam is connected via Bluetooth, would it override the amount of power being used if it were only connected via Wi-Fi? My guess would be “no” since the device is still being displayed in the Sonos app.

If you turn off the Wi-Fi on your mobile device and the Sonos app it says “WiFi Isn’t Connected,” does that mean the Roam is no longer connected to Wi-Fi? (note: I do not have any other Sonos devices)

SONOS: can’t you add an option within the app to disable the Roam’s Wi-Fi? 

I feel like this is a no-brainer solution to fix some of the battery issues...at least for those users trying to use the device as a portable speaker. God forbid that I try to use something that’s marketed as a portable speaker as a portable speaker