Personal experience: I have a ESP32 that runs as a sort of weather station. It has a ~2000mAh battery and lasts almost 2 months, getting a data point once every 30 minutes. That is using the ESPHome to program it.
Even at once every 10 minutes, it should manage almost 3 weeks without requiring a recharge.
Some options that definitely help is to quicken the Wifi reconnect. ESPHome has options to disable AP scanning and doing a fast-and-dirty connect&send. Using MQTT also helped a lot compared to using HTTP.
The most important part is to reduce the on-time as much as possible. 30 seconds is still way above the lower limit that I can do. If you halve it you can double the amount of data points without additional energy by reducing the sleep time.
I'm working on replacing the battery with a solar panel and supercap to power it from ambient shadow light entirely, the numbers to agree that it is possible in my case. Would help to keep it alive in cold weather.
Ah ha, that's good to know! Yeah in my case I had a small solar panel (a few quid of eBay, I guess around 1W) which was able to power it through a British winter (it did get direct sunlight though). I had some rechargable AAA batteries and just wired the solar panel in parallel with them.
After a few months it stopped working, I think some moisture got in and the DHT11 failed.
Even at once every 10 minutes, it should manage almost 3 weeks without requiring a recharge.
Some options that definitely help is to quicken the Wifi reconnect. ESPHome has options to disable AP scanning and doing a fast-and-dirty connect&send. Using MQTT also helped a lot compared to using HTTP.
The most important part is to reduce the on-time as much as possible. 30 seconds is still way above the lower limit that I can do. If you halve it you can double the amount of data points without additional energy by reducing the sleep time.
I'm working on replacing the battery with a solar panel and supercap to power it from ambient shadow light entirely, the numbers to agree that it is possible in my case. Would help to keep it alive in cold weather.