ESP8266 Community Forum

rahaman wrote: Is there a way to extend it to forever until it Resets?

That's a contradiction.
You can go to deep sleep again right after start up..

If you don't connect the GPIO to RESET external wire that it will sleep forever. Probably there is a better way but I have not seen API for this. Maybe some hints could be found in the HW description headers in the SDK.

i tried sleep modes "light", "modem", "none" and i surprised. i am using 2 aa battery (2.6v-3v) with esp-01 and i upload webserver example with 0.9.4 sdk. it's consuming avarage 15ma on idle and working mode consuming is avarage 35-45ma with "light" sleep mode. its consuming always 60-75ma with "none" mode and its consuming 20ma on idle and working avarage 60-70ma with "modem" sleep mode.

This corresponds to my measurements too.
One way to decrease the consumption is to set your AP with longer beacon interval and/or higher DTIM setting. This is possible with OpenWRT based routers. But this affects all devices on this WIFI interface and might decrease performance for mobile phones/laptops.
Texas Instruments have nice description in their wiki and app notes (for CC3200).
Maybe it will be possible to add second "virtual" WIFI network in OpenWRT that is dedicated to IoT devices. This way it will be "isolated" from other things in your home, with different WPA passphrase, so if somebody steals your garden light switch and dumps SPI flash on the ESP module, he will only get access to this separate network.