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Fast Battery Drain

Cashmonee

Cashmonee

macrumors 65832
Original poster
May 27, 2006
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I am having some pretty fast battery drain on my original stainless steel Watch. I took it to the Genius Bar today and they ran diagnostics and everything, including the battery health checked out fine. I reset both the watch and my iPhone back factory and set them up as new devices. I am still getting significant battery drain. Am I missing something? Is it the result of the phone and watch “setting themselves up”?
 
Cashmonee said:
I am having some pretty fast battery drain on my original stainless steel Watch. I took it to the Genius Bar today and they ran diagnostics and everything, including the battery health checked out fine. I reset both the watch and my iPhone back factory and set them up as new devices. I am still getting significant battery drain. Am I missing something? Is it the result of the phone and watch “setting themselves up”?
Click to expand...

Do you have any third-party applications that could be contributing to the battery drain?
 
I had 1Password, Spark, and Weather Channel. I will disable them all though.
 
To give an idea, in the last 22 minutes I have lost 4%. I looked at the watch one time in that span to read a message. So that would calculate out to 10 hours of battery which makes the watch useless. Frustrating.

How long do I give until I head back to Apple? They suggested to reset everything and if there was a still an issue to go back. Is there a wait time like with macOS where the battery is poor for a few days after a reinstall of the OS?
 
I have three series three watches and it happens to all of them occasionally. I haven't figured out why and I rarely use any apps on the watch much anymore other then the timer.

There was one time, my Nike+ lost 70% in 12 hrs.
 
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So today I drove to Monterey from Fresno, about 3 hours each way. I put my watch on at about 7:30 am. Power save came on at about 6:30 pm and it was dead a few minutes after that. This type of drain happens often on trips like this. I did have my phone playing Bluetooth audio in the car for the drive there and back (6 hours). Would that cause drain on the watch? If so, is there a way to prevent it?

I have an appointment on Thursday with Apple again, but I am curious if anyone has any ideas.
 
Cashmonee said:
So today I drove to Monterey from Fresno, about 3 hours each way. I put my watch on at about 7:30 am. Power save came on at about 6:30 pm and it was dead a few minutes after that. This type of drain happens often on trips like this. I did have my phone playing Bluetooth audio in the car for the drive there and back (6 hours). Would that cause drain on the watch? If so, is there a way to prevent it?

I have an appointment on Thursday with Apple again, but I am curious if anyone has any ideas.
Click to expand...

I think you have exercised everything you can to rectify the issue with the battery draining. I would explain to Apple of the issues that you have experienced continuously and see if they can replace the battery for you. Perhaps they will acknowledge the battery might be faulty or the degrading being it's a first generation Apple Watch.

Even if they conducted their battery test and you're still having issues, it still might be need replacing. Good luck and follow up with us.
 
When I have weird battery issues (more recently since I updated to the latest wOS), I go right to the battery usage stats to compare the Usage time vs. the Standby time.

When I'm running normally, my ratio is about 20-25%. When I'm having issues, the ratio jumps to around 60%.

Leads me to believe that I have a rouge app that won't stop running.
 
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ftaok said:
When I have weird battery issues (more recently since I updated to the latest wOS), I go right to the battery usage stats to compare the Usage time vs. the Standby time.

When I'm running normally, my ratio is about 20-25%. When I'm having issues, the ratio jumps to around 60%.

Leads me to believe that I have a rouge app that won't stop running.
Click to expand...

I played around with all the settings for the first couple of weeks of ownership, and categorically the best battery saving option i found was to turn off the heart monitor. If i need it for a workout it takes a few seconds to switch back. Comfortably get 2 days battery life now from my series 1, and that is with mixed/regular use, notifications, messages, odd phonecall. 7am till approx 11pm following day usage.
 
So yesterday I wore the watch most of the day and ended at 42%. I took it off for a couple of hours in the afternoon and it did not use any battery while it was off my wrist. It seems to be something connected to using the phone a lot. The more I use my phone, the more the battery drains on the watch, and the worst offender seems to be bluetooth audio.
 
Cashmonee said:
So yesterday I wore the watch most of the day and ended at 42%. I took it off for a couple of hours in the afternoon and it did not use any battery while it was off my wrist. It seems to be something connected to using the phone a lot. The more I use my phone, the more the battery drains on the watch, and the worst offender seems to be bluetooth audio.
Click to expand...
The biggest battery drain on the AW is the screen. If it's on, it's killing the battery.

Regarding your personal situation, what's your typical usage and standby times?

Also, perhaps you're playing your BT audio music via your AW and not the iPhone. (i.e. your BT headphones/speakers are connected to the AW and not the iPhone)
 
ftaok said:
The biggest battery drain on the AW is the screen. If it's on, it's killing the battery.

Regarding your personal situation, what's your typical usage and standby times?

Also, perhaps you're playing your BT audio music via your AW and not the iPhone. (i.e. your BT headphones/speakers are connected to the AW and not the iPhone)
Click to expand...

I typically reduce the screen brightness, disable Haptic feedback and turn "Hey Siri" off, and this dramatically increases my battery life. And the heart rate sensor is disabled unless for working out.
 
So the battery has greatly improved, and I pushed back my Genius Bar appointment. Yesterday I started at about 7:30 am and ended after 11:00 pm with 52% left. I had about 2 hours of driving while using the phone with Bluetooth audio, went to work for a while, and all in all had a pretty typical day. I think what may have done it is reseting network settings again and fully deleting the phone from the car's Bluetooth. If I get another good day, I'll cancel the appointment for now.

This is one area I wish Apple would really work to improve. In all my years of owning iPhones and other Apple battery powered devices, I have had battery issues due to software, but none of them resulted in the device being rendered useless. The Watch is playing with so little margin for error on battery that when something goes wrong, it is useless until you do whatever voodoo is necessary to exorcise the demons.

On a side note, thanks you all for the help and suggestions. This is what makes forums like these so great!
 
I've notices that if I have an app on my iPhone draining the battery at a very fast rate, it will also drain the battery on my watch. I had this happen again a few days ago. I went through and closed every open app on my phone, rebooted and the phone and watch went back to normal.
 
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