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How Much Does Your iPad 2 Battery Drain Overnight?

I

itzcoolz

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 6, 2010
106
0
I'm concerned about the battery life about the iPad 2. I know most people view this concern with skepticism, but I am fairly savvy with computers and gadgets. I've owned my fair share of devices and laptops including the iPad 1, and never had serious concerns with battery life.

I've tried several things to give it a chance to correct itself. I've fully discharged the iPad about 3x now in order to recalibrate it. I've turned off all push notifications. However, I'm consistently draining about 7-12% overnight (6.5hrs). The iPad software version is 4.3.1. with regular usage, it doesn't seem to be noticeably subpar, but it's a lot harder to compare. The issue is primarily with battery drain when the iPad is not in use. It's difficult to tell whether theres a problem though, because it's not drastically horrible, but seems just a little off.

How much is your iPad 2 draining overnight? Any other suggestions for things I should try and test? At what point should I contact Apple Care?

I have a 32GB 3G + Wifi model. I will try turning off the 3G tonight and see if that helps. However, if I'm having to turn off all push notifications and the 3G antenna when I'm not using my iPad, it seems like something is wrong, especially when coming from the iPad 1, which never gave me problems like this.
 
Did you try closing out all the apps? That much drain doesn't sound right at all. My original iPad drains 0% overnight.
 
1st night: put it in airplane mode and check the drop.
2nd night: turn on wireless only and keep the 3g off.
3rd night: have everything on.

keep push and location services on. make sure no bluetooth devices are connected.

report back with your findings.
 
Hmm... never noticed anything like this with my iPad 2, even with my original ipad. I would suggest you to fully charge it to 100% (keep the battery percentage bar on) and then leave it overnight, with all apps on the multi-task bar closed. It doesn't matter if you have 3G on because when you are connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot, the data is not being consumed by 3G anyway, so I shouldn't think that Wi-Fi drains battery a lot. Be sure to turn push notifications, or any other apps that require information from a particular server (the internet).

If you are really worried, I would suggest you to contact Apple and ask for a repair, it may be a faulty battery.
 
My experience has been very similar to yours. The battery drain on my iPad 2 is noticeably faster than with my old iPad 1. I haven't paid exact attention to my standby drain overnight but it's generally at least 5% where previously, my iPad 1 would usually still be at 100%.

Also, no specific data but battery drain during the day also seems significantly worse--I'm at 62% right now and have only done web browsing, email (manual fetch only) and about 30 minutes of my son playing angry birds. My daily habits haven't changed between devices yet with my old iPad, I rarely was below 80% at the end of the day. My settings are identical to my old iPad (set it up initially from iPad 1 backup) and in fact, I previously had Push turned on and now have shut that off to see if that would make a difference.

I've tried calibrating twice since purchase on launch day but noticed no change. I'm going to run a few tests (and also compare to my wife's iPad 2) but if the problem persists or is noticeably worse than my wifes, I think I'm going to wait a couple more weeks until inventory is a bit better and head down to an Apple Store to see if they'll swap it out.
 
itzcoolz said:
I'm concerned about the battery life about the iPad 2. I know most people view this concern with skepticism, but I am fairly savvy with computers and gadgets. I've owned my fair share of devices and laptops including the iPad 1, and never had serious concerns with battery life.

I've tried several things to give it a chance to correct itself. I've fully discharged the iPad about 3x now in order to recalibrate it. I've turned off all push notifications. However, I'm consistently draining about 7-12% overnight (6.5hrs). The iPad software version is 4.3.1. with regular usage, it doesn't seem to be noticeably subpar, but it's a lot harder to compare. The issue is primarily with battery drain when the iPad is not in use. It's difficult to tell whether theres a problem though, because it's not drastically horrible, but seems just a little off.

How much is your iPad 2 draining overnight? Any other suggestions for things I should try and test? At what point should I contact Apple Care?

I have a 32GB 3G + Wifi model. I will try turning off the 3G tonight and see if that helps. However, if I'm having to turn off all push notifications and the 3G antenna when I'm not using my iPad, it seems like something is wrong, especially when coming from the iPad 1, which never gave me problems like this.
Click to expand...

Do you have a strong 3G signal? If the signal is weak, then the iPad will drain far faster as it hunts around for a signal to lock on to (it's the same with phones)
 
I have the ipad 2 wi-fi 64gb model and the battery drains faster than it did on my ipad 1 wi-fi model. I have turned off everything I can find to turn off and it still drains faster. Am not sure what to think.
 
Overnight discharge

I charged my 16 GB WIFI last night before bed. Read about an hour on Kindle App. This morning I still had 100%.

I've never noticed ANY battery drain overnight. It's an IPad 2.
 
I have the same thing - about 7-9% drain overnight, which seems really weird. I hope it's not the unit, but I don't know what else it could be.
 
oHai said:
I have the same thing - about 7-9% drain overnight, which seems really weird. I hope it's not the unit, but I don't know what else it could be.
Click to expand...

Apparently it's a software bug, Apple is said to be releasing a new software update within the next 2 weeks, which will address a few minor bugs, including maximising battery life of the iPad through hardware changes.
 
1. Go into Restrictions and toggle Ping and App Store to OFF.
2. Charge to 100% turn on Airplane and unplug.

Let us know. My iPad 2 never drops more than 2% overnight with an hour of reading.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_6 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E200 Safari/6533.18.5)

My wifi iPad 2 drains 0-1% overnight. It's all good in the hood on my end. :)
 
itzcoolz said:
I'm concerned about the battery life about the iPad 2. I know most people view this concern with skepticism, but I am fairly savvy with computers and gadgets. I've owned my fair share of devices and laptops including the iPad 1, and never had serious concerns with battery life.

I've tried several things to give it a chance to correct itself. I've fully discharged the iPad about 3x now in order to recalibrate it. I've turned off all push notifications. However, I'm consistently draining about 7-12% overnight (6.5hrs). The iPad software version is 4.3.1. with regular usage, it doesn't seem to be noticeably subpar, but it's a lot harder to compare. The issue is primarily with battery drain when the iPad is not in use. It's difficult to tell whether theres a problem though, because it's not drastically horrible, but seems just a little off.

How much is your iPad 2 draining overnight? Any other suggestions for things I should try and test? At what point should I contact Apple Care?

I have a 32GB 3G + Wifi model. I will try turning off the 3G tonight and see if that helps. However, if I'm having to turn off all push notifications and the 3G antenna when I'm not using my iPad, it seems like something is wrong, especially when coming from the iPad 1, which never gave me problems like this.
Click to expand...

I keep it simple and always plug my iPad 2 in overnight. I have to because I use it as a bedside clock.
 
When I close all apps and leave wifi on it drains about 1%.

uhhh.... yeah, what gives? Battery drain is about as same as iPad 1 after 4.0 upgrade I'd say.Multi tasking is a real drain. I remember getting like a week's worth of use out of the first iPad then upgrading to 4.2 to find you'll get about day and a half.....
 
i really hope it's the ping issue, because then I can chalk it up to a software bug. i'll get back to you guys with the results. i think i'm going to first try it without ping. then, try it with the phone on airplane mode.

if it requires me to turn the iPad on airplane mode or to turn off push notifications, then that's disappointing in my opinion.

another question: does anybody have little to no battery drain by default? or did everybody have to disable ping? it's weird to me that only a slim minority of people seem to be reporting this issue
 
Meever said:
When I close all apps and leave wifi on it drains about 1%.

uhhh.... yeah, what gives? Battery drain is about as same as iPad 1 after 4.0 upgrade I'd say.Multi tasking is a real drain. I remember getting like a week's worth of use out of the first iPad then upgrading to 4.2 to find you'll get about day and a half.....
Click to expand...

I didn't think we needed to "close" apps.
 
Last night 37% then this morning 28%, couple of apps open, wifi connected but no email push/fetch.

Also have issue on wake from sleep, rotation of screen doesnt work without tuning off/on ipad.

Put it down to newness!
 
not looking good.... i turned off ping and set it down for about 4 hours, and it drained 5%.

when i go to sleep (soon), i'm going to do everything i can to shut it down (hard reset, close all background apps, and turn on airplane mode), and see how much battery drains.
 
I toggled Airplane Mode overnight and it had still dropped 6% from just sitting there. Ping is off. When I'm using it, the battery drops like 1% every couple of minutes. Something's not right.
 
Make sure auto lock is set on. I had mine set to never the other night and my smart cover must have slipped because it was on when I woke up and down about 9%.
 
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