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Something is draining my battery

thomamon

thomamon

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 24, 2008
1,221
163
Flemington, NJ
So I was pretty sure that something was using my battery while I wasn't using my iPhone because the usage was going up while I wasn't using it. But this morning I went to sleep at 7 AM and woke up at about noon, when I woke up I checked the usage and realize it said I had 47 minutes of usage.

I decided to do a little test. I snapped a screenshot of the battery usage and put the phone down for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes I picked it up and check the battery usage again, it reported 15 minutes of standby time and I didn't use the phone or get any notifications during that time. But they were four more additional usage minutes that were now being listed of usage.

Yesterday I went through the site I pasted below and try to bunch of those settings to see if that would help the battery, but now I'm even more sure than ever that there is something wrong. Last week I went to the Apple Store for a genius appointment and I had them check it out but the guy said there was nothing wrong with it. I'm tempted to take it back but it's a 45 minute drive and really don't want to go there for no reason again. Any suggestions?

http://www.scottyloveless.com/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-to-solving-ios-battery-drain
 
Same thing happened to my wife's, daughter, and my iPhone over the past couple weeks. 2 of the 5s and one 5c. Tried resetting, deleting apps, etc. nothing worked. Our backs of the phones would get very warm. Then after a day or two it stopped and we are back to excellent battery life. Also, it happened to our phones at different times and on different days.
 
It can be any number of things. Email accounts syncing (try deleting and re-adding them if you feel it's an issue), background data refresh (i.e. a podcast app), notifications being presented to you, iCloud data still downloading in the background, etc. Are you actually noticing a significant hit on your battery percentage, or is this purely off the usage time? Remember that usage time does not directly translate to screen on time; it translates to any "non-idle" time for the device.
 
Also if you have the FaceBook app, always shut it off when you are done and don't let it refresh in the background as it is a huge battery drain for some reason. Obnoxious. I hate FB with a burning resentment but my friends and relatives insisted I join it and become a fellow body-snatched pod person.
 
Nikhil72 said:
It can be any number of things. Email accounts syncing (try deleting and re-adding them if you feel it's an issue), background data refresh (i.e. a podcast app), notifications being presented to you, iCloud data still downloading in the background, etc. Are you actually noticing a significant hit on your battery percentage, or is this purely off the usage time? Remember that usage time does not directly translate to screen on time; it translates to any "non-idle" time for the device.
Click to expand...
i'm not experienced a good battery life everybody else's. It is seen for poor from the beginning. I have already done a bunch of what you said, I'm not even sure what else there is left for me to try. Only have my iCloud account for email, and that's now set to fetch.

Disabled a bunch of the location services yesterday, also disabled background updates. It could be the iCloud backup I suppose? Not sure at this point. A couple of minutes here and there for the usage time wouldn't bother me, but this morning it was over a half hour.
 
Make sure your background app refresh is turned off or at least choose the apps that you need that feature for. This can really drain your battery. I turned it off because I had zero need for this and my 6 Plus's battery life has increased dramatically. I used it all day yesterday including making wifi calls, web surfing and texting and I couldn't get it to go below 80% charge.

Settings-General-Background App Refresh.
 
GrumpyMom said:
Also if you have the FaceBook app, always shut it off when you are done and don't let it refresh in the background as it is a huge battery drain for some reason. Obnoxious. I hate FB with a burning resentment but my friends and relatives insisted I join it and become a fellow body-snatched pod person.
Click to expand...
I disable location services for Facebook yesterday as well as background refresh, I also shut off a bunch of the notifications so they wouldn't drain my battery either. It does not appear to be any help.

----------
HenryDJP said:
Make sure your background app refresh is turned off or at least choose the apps that you need that feature for. This can really drain your battery. I turned it off because I had zero need for this and my 6 Plus's battery life has increased dramatically. I used it all day yesterday including making wifi calls, web surfing and texting and I couldn't get it to go below 80% charge.

Settings-General-Background App Refresh.
Click to expand...
Again I've already attempted this yesterday and it was no help at all.
 
Yep!

Facebook is a HIDEOUS battery drainer.

I'd try this:

-Set phone to airplane mode before you go to sleep.
-Make a note of battery percentage.
-Sleep.
-Wake up.
-Note percentage after you wake up.

This rules out any radio/bluetooth/wifi related drain.

Then see what apps are utilizing the most.

There's also an app called Normal that will analyze the apps on your phone and determine which ones are battery hogs.

Good luck!
 
thomamon said:
Again I've already attempted this yesterday and it was no help at all.
Click to expand...

Oh, sorry I missed that earlier in the thread. Just make sure you're getting good reception. If at any time it's searching for service it will drain up to 40% of your battery. I used to work for Sprint. That was usually the main culprit.
 
aliensporebomb said:
Facebook is a HIDEOUS battery drainer.

I'd try this:

-Set phone to airplane mode before you go to sleep.
-Make a note of battery percentage.
-Sleep.
-Wake up.
-Note percentage after you wake up.

This rules out any radio/bluetooth/wifi related drain.

Then see what apps are utilizing the most.

There's also an app called Normal that will analyze the apps on your phone and determine which ones are battery hogs.

Good luck!
Click to expand...
Worth a shot.

----------
HenryDJP said:
Oh, sorry I missed that earlier in the thread. Just make sure you're getting good reception. If at any time it's searching for service it will drain up to 40% of your battery. I used to work for Sprint. That was usually the main culprit.
Click to expand...

How do you know if it's that?
 
HenryDJP said:
Oh, sorry I missed that earlier in the thread. Just make sure you're getting good reception. If at any time it's searching for service it will drain up to 40% of your battery. I used to work for Sprint. That was usually the main culprit.
Click to expand...

Can you provide data on that? The 40% of drain?
I can say that I go to a location that is basically a bunker due to some weird fire law. I get no service, legitimately, but every so often I get "1x" on data or something like that. My battery can jump from 90% to 70% in an hour. One day I was there for 4 hours, I had 100% battery just unplugged from the car. I never used it knowing it was pointless and I was down to 10%.
 
GoCubsGo said:
Can you provide data on that? The 40% of drain?
I can say that I go to a location that is basically a bunker due to some weird fire law. I get no service, legitimately, but every so often I get "1x" on data or something like that. My battery can jump from 90% to 70% in an hour. One day I was there for 4 hours, I had 100% battery just unplugged from the car. I never used it knowing it was pointless and I was down to 10%.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately I am unable to provide such data. It was never written in numbers. The Sprint engineers relayed this information to us for our customers. But searching for service definitely causes battery drain.
 
aliensporebomb said:
Facebook is a HIDEOUS battery drainer.

There's also an app called Normal that will analyze the apps on your phone and determine which ones are battery hogs.

Good luck!
Click to expand...

Awesome App! Thanks for the suggestion. It recognized on my device that the Podcasts App should be killed when not in use and have background refresh turned off. It estimates with 99% confidence that this will give me 45 mins of extra battery life.

I do use podcasts a lot, but I don't think it always needs to be on in the background so this makes sense.
 
Have you tried a hard reset? So pushing and holding sleep and home button until you see the apple logo. Your phone will restart.
Battery Doctor is also a good free app. I also use system status (paid version, but there is a free version too) where you can see your cpu usage. And when I let this app open for half a minute, the cpu usage of my iPhone 5 is under 5%, mostly between 1.5 and 3.5%
That means my cpu is really in idle.
 
Coupz said:
Have you tried a hard reset? So pushing and holding sleep and home button until you see the apple logo. Your phone will restart.
Battery Doctor is also a good free app. I also use system status (paid version, but there is a free version too) where you can see your cpu usage. And when I let this app open for half a minute, the cpu usage of my iPhone 5 is under 5%, mostly between 1.5 and 3.5%
That means my cpu is really in idle.
Click to expand...
Yeah, no luck with that...

I am thinking it may be poor reception at home. Just noticed I only have two circles next to LTE...
 
contact your local priest and schedule a exorcism for your phone. Obviously possessed by a battery demon.
 
The culprit for me was a problematic download update of iMovie. Might have got corrupted or something but it essentially cycled nonstop while draining battery. It was not immediately obvious it was doing this.
 
The new iOS shows you which apps are using your battery under usage. Does that reveal anything for you?
 
I checked my battery usage and for the last week Facebook is at 44%. My 4s battery only lasts about 3 hours before I have to charge. Very annoying.
 
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