Rapid Power Drain

[filmbuff]

I've had an issue a few times in the last couple days where my computer will start to get hot while browsing the internet, and drain the battery rapidly. I use Battery Health and normally my MBA draws about 7 watts while browsing in Firefox. When the computer starts to get hot Battery Health shows a drain of ~14 Watts. I've opened activity monitor and there are no programs using an excessive amount of processor - in fact there is hardly any load on the processor at all. Just for good measure I force-quit most of my running apps and the drain came down but only by 0.5 watt. Restarting fixed the problem.

I'm assuming there is some background program (possibly flash) using a lot of graphics power but it is weird that there is no load on the CPU. Has anyone else experienced this? It's a 2012 MBA 13 i5.

[macdudesir]

if its getting really hot too, I would say it could be a glitch in OSX i noticed a while ago (it may be fixed now.) that if you woke up the computer on one power source, then changed power sources with a few minutes, it cause it to heat up with no processor usage. Although it probably isn't this, as i noticed it only happened waking up on battery and plugging in. but what you describe is what i saw, and restart did fix it.

[Bob Coxner]

I have a 2011 i5 13" MBA with ML. Battery Health shows around 13 watts for me while browsing in Chrome. However, I don't have the heat problem. I'm usually around 43-47C while browsing. If I'm watching Netflix I'm usually around 55-60C.