iPhone Battery Life Fixed!!!! Thank you everyone.

[faroZ06]

After you do this, run the battery to zero. (Preferably time it so it's 0% about the time you're going to sleep at night.) Then charge it all night while you sleep.

What? Running your battery to 0% is bad for it. Or do you mean to calibrate it somehow?

Batteries work by running redox reactions that produce some products. Once there are too many products, the battery is "dead". If you add electric current, you can reverse these redox reactions and turn the products back into the reactants, but you can't get back ALL of the original reactants. So every time you let it lose charge then charge it again, you lose some big-picture battery life.

 

[jlake02]

What? Running your battery to 0% is bad for it. Or do you mean to calibrate it somehow?

Batteries work by running redox reactions that produce some products. Once there are too many products, the battery is "dead". If you add electric current, you can reverse these redox reactions and turn the products back into the reactants, but you can't get back ALL of the original reactants. So every time you let it lose charge then charge it again, you lose some big-picture battery life.

Most of the boards I have studied have suggested running the LithiumIon battery to 0% 2-3 times on a new iPhone to calibrate the software. Additionally, many advise running it to 0% around once a month.

I'm definitely not an expert but I've had good success with several iPhones by doing this.

 

[daviddth]

What? Running your battery to 0% is bad for it. Or do you mean to calibrate it somehow?

Once the phone turns off the battery is not completely discharged, but the voltage has fallen to a point the phone considers flat. By letting the phone get to this point occasionally, say every month or two, the electronics telling you the actual capacity of the battery get the zero point reset, to allow a better indication of the battery % in the future.

Charging the battery from 50% to 100% twice is pretty much the same in terms of battery life as from 0% to 100% once.

 

[faroZ06]

Once the phone turns off the battery is not completely discharged, but the voltage has fallen to a point the phone considers flat. By letting the phone get to this point occasionally, say every month or two, the electronics telling you the actual capacity of the battery get the zero point reset, to allow a better indication of the battery % in the future.

Charging the battery from 50% to 100% twice is pretty much the same in terms of battery life as from 0% to 100% once.

I've been told and have experienced from rough, non-scientific experiments that running it to 0% once is worse than running it to 50% twice. I've lost 2 (almost 3) camera batteries to leaving the battery uncharged for too long. This is semi-superstition, but I like to be safe and not let them drop to 0%.

But the calibration thing makes sense. It also says in the Apple manual for the MacBook that a full charging cycle should be used once a month. I highly doubt it's good to do it more frequently than necessary, but if you need to calibrate it, go ahead.

 

[cynics]

Once the phone turns off the battery is not completely discharged, but the voltage has fallen to a point the phone considers flat. By letting the phone get to this point occasionally, say every month or two, the electronics telling you the actual capacity of the battery get the zero point reset, to allow a better indication of the battery % in the future.

Charging the battery from 50% to 100% twice is pretty much the same in terms of battery life as from 0% to 100% once.

Actually it's not. Check out this link.

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

Letting the battery die completely gives you about 300-500 cycles. So you'd figure letting drain to 50% would get you 600-1000 cycles. But it doesn't it gets you 1200-1500 cycles in the batteries life. There is a lot of interesting info from them.

 

[dcrumbaugh]

Just did a reset all settings. Pretty much anything that has a "default" option - as opposed to something specific to you - gets reset. So no need to re-add email accounts, for example, but you lose any signatures you set and various display options, etc. 10 minutes to re-configure and done.

I've had zero probs with my 10-day-old 5, but restored from my 4 JB'en backup when I got the phone. Inspecting yesterday's backup with iBackupBot shows all the JB/Cydia app plists carried over to the 5 so who knows if they'll still be there if/when the 5 JB is finally out.

 

[jlake02]

but you lose any signatures you set .

Nice catch! I didn't notice that.. fixed now!

 

[jk4lebron23]

Just tried this, I'll update sometime soon about battery life

 

[fongyuen]

did u ever read of anyone who did not restore but set up as new and doing the batt recycle and resetting all settings and still getting a boost in batt life?

 

[flightgamer]

fongyuen

As you can read in my original post I got an improvement in battery life by calibrating the battery BEFORE resetting it so I know that has the potential to help you to some extent. Resetting your device couldn't hurt but I have been reading it only helps those that didn't start as new.

 

[fongyuen]

Ok thanks. I've already recalibrated my batt and if there was any improvement, prob wasn't that significant. I'm getting about 6-7 hrs with LTE off (no coverage). Would like to join the ranks of the 9-10 hr group.

 

[wildonrio]

The biggest worry I have with this is losing my text messages. I have all of them since 2010 and it's quite enjoyable to go back through them now and then, like a journal of sorts.

Can someone totally confirm that the text messages are not lost when you reset all settings? This is very important to me. Thanks!

 

[snowydog]

I started as new but couldn't hurt to try it anyway.

I'm getting about 4-5 hours of light use. Not great. I'm not even using 3G or anything because I'm awaiting a new sim from work and this is just a PAYG that I haven't topped up so basically I'm only using wifi and its all light usage.

Like I said, set up from new as this is my first iPhone. Quite disappointed in the battery life tbh. I'm hoping it gets better because I don't think it's meant to be this low for my light usage.

If Its no better in a week or two, I might go to the apple store and see what they say.

Anyway gonna try this method ... For clarification ... You let your battery run to 0% then charged it fully to 100% and THEN reset all settings.

Or do you reset all settings first. Let me know cos I'm on 35% at the minute so would like to know whether to reset before or after charge.

Thanks

 

[HowardSmith]

To the OP, I am glad this worked out for you.

What I do not understand is how others get great battery life by restoring their phone from the Cloud and using LTE. It is a real puzzle what difference there is that dramatically increases battery life.

I restored my iPhone 5 from the cloud and been on LTE from the day I got my phone and have had great battery life. Battery consumption is not even a concern.

 

[Dstopsie]

I was told to do this once a day by an Apple genius three years ago to reset all your settings. Turning off LTE significantly improved my standby times and usage times on this iPhone. previously by the time I got home from work my battery was pretty much drained down to 20%. now with the same usage I get home from work and my battery is it 50 to 60% and I haven't even been able to drain it down to 0% in one day. You should also close all your applications that are running in your TaskManager to help improve battery life because they do cause a drain on the battery when they're running in the background

 

[SunnyFL]

So under the rest tab select Reset all settings? as you can see I need to do something.

 

[SunnyFL]

To the OP, I am glad this worked out for you.

What I do not understand is how others get great battery life by restoring their phone from the Cloud and using LTE. It is a real puzzle what difference there is that dramatically increases battery life.

I restored my iPhone 5 from the cloud and been on LTE from the day I got my phone and have had great battery life. Battery consumption is not even a concern.

I read somewhere that cellular signal quality can play a part in baattery life too.

 

[HowardSmith]

I read somewhere that cellular signal quality can play a part in baattery life too.

Poor signal is a HUGE FACTOR in battery use. No doubt. This is why everyone posting their battery usage is absolutely useless for comparison purposes.

 

[cynics]

I restored my phone (4S) with a fresh copy of iOS 6 and used my iCloud back up. It helped I went from 5 hours to 6-6 1/2. According to the app "Carat" I rank at 63 (50 is average) so I guess that's not too bad. I'd love to be in a 7-8 hour usage guy though.

 

[jlake02]

I did the reset yesterday.. ran battery to zero and charged all night.

Sadly, I'm not seeing any improvement (1:18 PM the next day).

6 hr 18 minutes standby, 1hr 15 minutes usage and I'm at 73%. Not terribly bad, but about the same as before the reset.

I'll report back after I use it longer and see more results.

 

[mikeydeezy]

Wow this may have actually cleared up my battery concerns.

I've been unplugged since 6:30am and I'm at 94% with my usual usage. Yesterday, before the reset, by this time I was nearing 80%.


Thanks for the heads-up!

 

[fongyuen]

out of curiosity, how much batt life do you guys lose in the overnight period if your phone is not plugged in? OP said he only loses 1% which is prob about right, but I lose like 7-10%. and this is with LTE off and many location based stuff off.

what about the rest of you guys?

 

[AppleFan360]

The biggest worry I have with this is losing my text messages. I have all of them since 2010 and it's quite enjoyable to go back through them now and then, like a journal of sorts.

Can someone totally confirm that the text messages are not lost when you reset all settings? This is very important to me. Thanks!

Do you have a Mac? I would suggest getting Phoneview (http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/). It extracts all of your text messages from your phone. Then you can turn them all into a PDF for archiving. I had text messages stored since 2008 and was finally able to archive them and dump them off the phone and into a very small PDF.

Now my restore routine runs much faster and have more memory available on the phone.

 

[BFizzzle]

Poor signal is a HUGE FACTOR in battery use. No doubt. This is why everyone posting their battery usage is absolutely useless for comparison purposes.

AMEN

in my office i had 1-2 sometimes 3 bars. LTE
they did some work to the tower i guess because now i get 3 constant, and sometimes 4.

when watching netflix with the weaker signal (productive i know) i would get about 4.5 hours
with the constant 3 bars i get 6.5 constant netflix over LTE.
Normal/light use (no streaming) 9+ hours easy.

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out of curiosity, how much batt life do you guys lose in the overnight period if your phone is not plugged in? Op said he only loses 1% which is prob about right, but i lose like 7-10%. And this is with lte off and many location based stuff off.

What about the rest of you guys?

1% here

 

[Jnardis]

I restored from backup (Iphone 4 which was JB'ed) and my battery life is unbelievable. I don't use LTE. Battery life is anywhere from 10 to 12 hours of usage. I have 5 email accounts and am usually on wifi (between work and home). The only time I get less that 10 hours is when I use NAV.