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Manage battery power

Battery charge information and best practices for battery-powered payment terminals.

If battery-powered payment terminals are essential for your daily operations, it is important to keep an eye on the battery charge level.

It is also important to understand that battery performance depends on a wide variety of factors. For example:

Therefore, we cannot make precise statements about how long a terminal can remain turned on before you need to recharge it. But we have seen a positive effect on battery life from the power management settings that we enable by default, especially sleep mode settings.

Sleep mode

Payment terminals have a power management setting that ensures the terminal goes to sleep after a period of inactivity. The terminal will wake up when:

  • You send a request to it.
  • You press any key on Verifone Engage terminals, or the power key on Android terminals.
  • The terminal makes a maintenance call to our system.
  • The terminal receives a "network event".

You can use API requests to update the sleep mode timeouts for both Android and Verifone terminals, or contact the Support Team.

Engage terminals

Verifone Engage terminals go to sleep after 30 seconds of inactivity. This power management setting is enabled by default from version 1.65.

If you are facing problems with battery life, we suggest updating to release 1.65 or later.

Android terminals

For Android terminals, the Android operating system takes care of power management. However, from version 1.69 our Support Team can configure the period of inactivity after which the terminal goes to sleep. The default value is 30 seconds.

Monitor the battery charge level

If the battery charge level drops below a certain threshold, the terminal doesn't process transactions anymore. This threshold is set to 5% for Verifone Engage terminals. On Android terminals, we cannot enforce such a threshold.

To monitor the battery charge level of your Engage and Android terminals:

  • Check the battery icon on the display.

  • Enable showing a Low Battery warning on the display when the battery charge drops below a certain level. We recommend setting this level at 20%. Contact our Support Team to configure this feature.

    On Android terminals a Low Battery warning appears automatically and doesn't need to be configured.

  • Check the payment response. The AdditionalResponse includes the batteryLevel.

  • Send a diagnosis request to the terminal. The AdditionalResponse includes the batteryLevel.

Battery replacement

Because batteries deteriorate during their lifecycle, it is good to monitor battery performance over time.

In case of battery failure, you can return or replace the terminal.

For V400m, e285, and Android terminals, you can order spare batteries.

Battery charging

Always use the charger that you received with the terminal.

These are the power requirements for terminals that do not come with a charger:

  • e285: 5V DC, 1A
  • e280: 5V DC, 1A

We recommend charging the battery when the charge level drops to around 15%.

Events and network connection

There are several events that wake up the terminal from sleep mode. The most common events are:

  • A key is pressed on the terminal.
  • The terminal makes a maintenance call to our systems.
  • The terminal receives a message packet over the network. This is called a network event.
    Examples are requests sent from the POS app to the terminal, but also "noise" from the network like Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) broadcasts sent to all devices on the network.

If your integration is constantly sending message packets to the terminal, battery performance will not be very good because the terminal isn't able to go into sleep mode.

Apart from the number of network packets the terminal receives, the network interface itself also influences battery life:

  • Wi-Fi: in general, battery performance is good with a Wi-Fi connection. Engage terminals have a packet filter that wakes up the terminal only when a dedicated message is sent to the terminal. Additional noise from the network is filtered out.
    However, poor network connectivity causes the battery to drain faster. To prevent this, consider using cellular failover.

  • Cellular: because a cellular connection uses a private network Access Point Name (APN), there is little to no traffic waking up the device. Thus, a cellular connection will lead to a good battery performance.

  • Bluetooth: V400m terminals with a Bluetooth base station connection and e280 or e285 terminals with a Bluetooth PAN connection to a mobile device do not have a packet filter. Therefore, it is critical you do not expose the terminal to unnecessary network events.

Android app design

If you deploy apps on your Android terminals, note that the design of the app can have a big impact on the battery life.

Storage conditions

Take into account the following conditions when storing batteries and terminals:

  • Storage temperature: -20°C to 60°C.
  • Relative humidity: 5% to 95% non condensing.
  • Battery charge level: 40% to 70% (check at least every six months).

See also