I bought 3 Roku Streaming Stick+ (3810X) a month ago. They are all running 9.4.0 build 4200-50. Two of the three remotes won’t even last a week before they need new batteries. Those two Rokus were only used for a couple days and the TVs they’re plugged into were powered off all the rest of the time. The 3rd Roku gets used every day. Strangely, the batteries in that remote are still at 60%.
The only difference between these Rokus is that the 3rd Roku stick gets its power directly from a wall outlet while the other two sticks get their power from the TV’s USB port so they lose power when the TV is turned off.
It makes me wonder if powering the sticks via the TV’s USB port somehow causes the batteries in the remotes to drain much more quickly than when the sticks are powered by the wall outlet. Perhaps the batteries are drained as the remotes keep trying to find the Roku sticks when they lose power. I’m going to try powering all of my sticks via a wall outlet and see if that helps make the remote batteries last longer.
Strange. We have been using Roku’s since they first came out, & have never encountered this problem. I will say we have never had any luck using the TV to power the Roku. Always end up plugging it into the wall socket.
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I’ve found that powering the sticks via wall outlet helps slow down the remote battery drain, but they are still draining much faster than any other remote I’ve ever used. New batteries already down to 80% after just 3 days of light use.
That’s pretty crazy. I haven’t bought a Roku in a couple years but I used to run a few of them throughout the house, I recall batteries lasting at least a year.
Have you checked with Roku support? You mentioned your Roku sticks are up to date but I wonder if there’s a firmware update available for the remotes. I know my Nvidia Shield spits out a firmware update for the remote every so often.
Roku Support first sent me new remotes that are the exact same model & firmware as mine. They didn’t fix anything. Now they tell me to try powering the sticks via wall outlets instead of the TV’s USB ports. That seems to help a little but the batteries still drain too fast.
This is not going to be helpful. Roku sticks, are, in my opinion, not worth a damn. They’re underpowered so as to not produce too much heat because they radiate it way without a fan. They still manage to overheat, and not work reliably. They can’t be wired into the wired Ethernet when you realize that you’d prefer that for reliability reasons (watching high bandwidth content over WiFi never works well.) I would consider trying the new Google Chromecast with Google TV dongles. For an extra $15 or so you can get a wired Ethernet adapter. The remotes on them are tiny, but work really quite well. If you’re stuck on Roku, get one of the non-stick format ones… They’re a little pricier, but they’re more capable and large enough to overheat less.
(Edit: my experience with Roku sticks comes from getting two of them from Amazon to plug into my DVDO HDMI switchers. They were always warm, even when not in use, frequently they would suffer some corruption requiring a full reset, and they were slow as heck. I got them because I though they would be useful and fun to experience, but within a month they were permanently unplugged and have never been used since.)
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It’s not just me, the batteries in the remote for my streaming stick last about two weeks. and for the overheating issue I had a right angle HDMI adapter and that solved the problem