My 5-year-old son is our Ping user… we buy the Energizer Lithium Batteries and they regularly last us 6-8 weeks before even going down one “bar” on the pump’s battery meter. When they do go down one “bar” that’s when we go ahead and replace them because I’ve found that the pump doesn’t communicate well with the remote AT ALL if either of them are even slightly low on battery.
That’s important to us because - as my son is 5 - he doesn’t dose himself and we use the remote for almost everything. I would say that I physically manipulate his pump less than once a day.
We’re also not doing combo boluses for our son very often at all.
Thanks for the input, Chris. Just out of curiosity, how do you know that the pump and remote aren’t communicating? Does it give you an error message? Yes, I think combo boluses would use the battery. I’ve only begun a little to try those out. I can imagine it’s all a whole different ballgame with a 5-year old. I like the image of mom or dad zapping their child from afar! No disrespect intended; I’m still chuckling over the woman who said she would make her pump vibrate when her husband rolled over onto it to get him to move!
Could be any number of things. I’ve had times where the batteries were old (not with the Ping but with meters) and they didn’t hold up.
You’re also a new pumper. It’s normal that you would be doing things with the pump much more often than you will once you’ve made the initial adjustment. I found that every time I upgraded my pump I went through batteries much quicker as I played more with the new features the first few weeks. Once you get into the swing of your new normal my guess is the battery drainage will be more normal.
putting your pump on lock?? never done that, I don’t believe your cat could do that I sleep with my cat and dog and the wife too,lol never had a problem
LOL… it just proves that diabetes are real people too!
Yeah - we really LOVE the remote control… that’s actually a huge part of the reason why we chose the Ping. My son is a very typical rough and tumble highly active 5-year-old… when he’s done eating he’s ready to RUN RUN RUN… it’s so much easier to dose him while he’s wrestling with his brother then it is to ask him to come and stand still while I work on his pump.
Yes - I can tell that wireless communication is suffering when I start to get error messages during what previously would have been a totally reasonable distance for me to bolus him. This is just my conjecture but I’m a computer guy… I feel there’s a communication feedback loop during bolus… for each unit delivered the remote/meter waits for the pump to say “ok, it was delivered” before it sends the next command for the next unit to be delivered (we have him set on slow delivery). When the battery is getting low sometimes I’ll go to bolus him and:
It errors “Communication” before it begins the bolus which means I have to re-dial all the settings
It errors in the middle of the bolus - which is really a pain in the butt because the meter may report that he DIDN’T get the insulin at all - but I’ll check the pump itself (I have learned that I must do this) and the pump reports that he DID get the insulin.
Sometimes too I’ll just turn the remote on to read the last bolus time and amount and I can be standing 3’ from him and it’ll tell me that it can’t find the pump… if the battery is getting low.
I tend to make all his caregivers use the remote also because I really like picking him up and I’ll scroll-through his day on the remote while he plays to see what all his readings and boluses and carbs were… if I had to look at the pump I’d have to make him wait while I do that and perform mental calculations, etc…
So yeah… for a parent of a 5-year-old boy, the remote really is a Godsend. I share the complaints of others about the screen resolution/visibility and the overall slowness of it’s performance but it’s still a great thing.
It’s probably highly unlikely that the correct sequence of keys could get pressed to inject, but it’s a caution that feels good so what the heck! I rarely use the pump itself so it’s no biggie to unlock it.
Thanks Chris. for the ins and outs of the RF communication. It does sound easier to change the battery sooner rather than later. Not having children I admit I haven’t thought much about how all this works for them, but hearing your description it sounds like getting the pump with the remote is a no-brainer for a young child and allows him to play and just be a kid while his caregivers “take care of business” for him. You sound like a great parent.
Thanks, Amanda. I’m going to assume it was either an old battery they sent me, all the time I spent on the pump programming things or a combination of the two. I’ll worry about it if the new battery doesn’t last long either!
My first battery lasted 3 weeks, but the weird thing is that it went from having 2 bars to none within 2 hours of sleeping… if you sleep on it and continue to press the buttons can it die quicker? Or maybe the battery slot had a problem…
I decided that everyone was right that the first battery probably went that quickly because A. I did a lot of button pushing learning and then programming all the settings that first week and B. It might have been old to begin with. I’m now at nearly a month since then with no reduction in bars!
I lock my pump at night, so I think random button pushing wouldn’t wear the battery - also probably hard to hit the button (small) exactly right with your body (large) (which makes locking probably unnecessary to begin with!)
Also you can set alarms to go off for various things, I think the battery is included in that.
Worse case scenario? If you had no delivery all night you would be quite high in the AM and would need to give yourself a shot, but you wouldn’t die.
