Random quick draining of Phone battery

[wrcsixeight]

I have a Samsung S4 mini a little over a year old

I have witnessed 4 incidents where the phone battery discharges abnormally fast. Screen off, Wifi off, GPS off, All apps off, fair strength Signal, the phone just depletes the battery like the NSA is Spying on me, and the phone is noticeably warm.

It happened again today. from 90% to 15% in 2 hours, the only task, playing some music through a bluetooth speaker.

Usually I can use this BT speaker for 8 hours straight and the phone battery is still good for several more hours

Wifi was off, GPS off, No data used, mobile or Wifi.

I have a USB power meter. I recharged the phone to 100%, and left it plugged in. Any current it registers at that point is what the phone is using to ping the towers and run whatever else it is running.

It was using between 0.25amp to 0.40amps briefly jumping upto 0.55a , screen off, GPS off, WIFI off, BT off, all Apps closed., nothing indicating it was self updating, signal strength 4 of 5 bars.

Nothing I did, like clear the RAM, had any effect on power consumption.

Usually, when the battery is fully charged, the USB meter will read 0.00 amps, and sometimes read 0.05a briefly and other times read 0.20a for a second or two before dropping back to 0.00.

I restarted the phone and the 0.40 remained after it restarted and settled in, and then it dropped to 0.05a and the then the normal behavior, and has been acting fine since.

Anybody have any idea what is going on these times when it is in the mood to punish the battery?

 

[Doog]

Did you do a hard reset and remove the battery and clean the contacts with a pencil eraser? If after that with all of the apps closed? You should discharge the battery to 5% then fully charge. If that fails replace the battery. My S3 will last about 3 days on a charge if everything is off and it's just n idle and it's 2 years old.

 

[901Memphis]

First things first do a full system wipe and start fresh.

 

[wrcsixeight]

Pencil erasers are too abrasive. I use Caig DeOxit Gold, last time about a month ago.

Since restart, it is behaving normally.

 

[user52165]

Is the phone warm during the discharge time and no tasks?

 

[ThirdeYe]

I used to have the same issue with my old SIII. I used to have to reboot it when that would happen and it would stop discharging. In my case, I think it was a glitch with taking it in and out of airplane mode or something like that. My LG G2 that I have now also has phantom drains, but it could be from an app running or something. It doesn't get quite as hot as the SIII did and again, it's solved by a reboot.

 

[wrcsixeight]

Yes it is warmer than normal when the battery is draining at the excessive rate. Nearly As warm as it ever gets when at full brightness and streaming video.

My USb power meter is relatively new, so it was interesting to put a number on the battery draw when it acted up like this.

Been 3 hours since I restarted the phone, reading 94% still.

 

[Koz1]

HTC One X it would happen after wifi was on, if it felt warm during wifi use I would reboot it and fixed.

 

[mikered30]

Download the app called wakelock detector, you most likely have apps being held open for a large amount of time and also look into GSam Battery Monitor, it is much better than the stock battery tracking app. Using both of those apps, I was able to figure out why my battery was dying so fast. Once you find out what wakelocks are keeping your phone running busy you can google the wakelock name and find possible solutions. Good luck.

 

[Turk]

Similar --- My Wife's Samsung Galaxy 4 LTE drains the Battery EVERY DAY, with almost no usage, since new several months ago!!

It has to be plugged in EVERY night, or the battery would go dead the next day.

Task Manager lists nothing running and she had not downloaded any apps....

Suggestions?? Thank you!!

 

[SwampSurvivor]

The various LG Spectrums I had all did this. Very frustrating. Ultimately, that's why I had to get rid of it.

I always chalked it up to buggy firmware or a bad included app that I was not able to get rid of

 

[razel]

Sounds like it's running normal again after your restart. Regardless, my experience with battery drainage outside of high CPU usage was old radio tech dealing with weak signals.

My previous phone a 2012 era LG Viper would heat itself up whenever it would be in a fringe 4G coverage causing it to switch back and forth between 3G/4G. Battery life would be about 2 hours whenever that happens, however, it was so alarmingly hot I ended up just turning airplane mode on. It wasn't until later that I saw the option to force it not use 4G in those situations.

My current phone a LG Nexus 5 has yet to heat up outside of screen brightness, CPU/GPU usage. And yes, whenever I sense that it has greater than normal battery usage, I do the usually swipe the apps close then stop the app. However these newer phones are so fast, it's usually just easier to restart them which I am normally against, since it will flush out the RAM and all the goodie cache that the OS has learned that you like to use to keep performance high. Oh well.

 

[wrcsixeight]

How does one know which Apps one can safely remove or force to stop?

I hardly ever use any additional apps, but when I clear my Ram it will say something like 35 applications closed, and then they restart on their own.

As far as open apps I choose to run, it is rarely more than the camera, music player, photo gallery, and internet. I have an Application indicator on my home page which shows how many are open, and I almost always hold down the home Key and end all apps whenever I see more than 1 operating.

Yesterdays quick draining happened in an area where 4gLTE is sometimes available, sometimes not, depending on weather and exact phone orientation.

Next time I notice the quick drain, I will try airplane mode. i forgot to do so when I had my USB power meter hooked up and a fully charged battery.

 

[racer12306]

Originally Posted By: Turk
Similar --- My Wife's Samsung Galaxy 4 LTE drains the Battery EVERY DAY, with almost no usage, since new several months ago!!

It has to be plugged in EVERY night, or the battery would go dead the next day.

Task Manager lists nothing running and she had not downloaded any apps....

Suggestions?? Thank you!!



Sounds normal to me. Smart phones don't have the life of dumb phones. My dumb phone goes weeks between charges just sitting idle. My Note 2 could go about a day and a half with moderate use.

 

[moklock]

Google how to boot the phone into recovery mode and clear the system cache. Also uninstall Facebook if it is on the device. That combo fixed a battery drain issue on my moto x a few months ago. I think the removing and re downloading facebook was the main issue.

 

[dlayman]

One thing I've found to be a major battery drain are apps that have access to your location. Even if your GPS is turned off, the apps use the cell tower signal to access your location (usually for no good reason). When I went into settings and disallowed apps to have access to my location (the apps now request permission when I use them, and when I close the app, I have to go back and again change the setting to not allow apps to accesss my location). This alone saved about 40% of my battery. All kinds of apps do this - weather, sports apps, XM radio. Most can still function well without access location, I think its nothing more than data gathering and snooping, at our expense.

 

[dlayman]

Also, any apps that sync (such as email, calendar etc.) with other devices or services will drain battery. Controlling how often these things sync also affects battery life significantly.

 

[JHZR2]

Li-ion batteries can get dendritic formations that can manifest themselves as short circuits. A high resistance "soft" short can do a slow self-drain, and only occur intermittently. A low resistance "hard" short can be catastrophic.

If software reset/wipe doesn't do it, then I'd replace the battery.

 

[SHOZ]

I use the Avast Battery Saver app. It works good if you aren't always using the WiFi. Otherwise it turns on the WiFi when you start an app that uses it.

 

[Cujet]

Unrelated, but possibly interesting...

My iPhone 4s would randomly drain the battery so fast, it would require cooling.

All apps, wifi and bluetooth were force closed and the phone was simply in my pocket.

After searching the phone for any sort of anomaly that could cause this, I found 2 additional email accounts that had nothing to do with me. The phone was mine since new, and I KNOW that originally the only email account on the phone was mine. I don't recall the email account names at the moment, but they were quite strange.

After deleting both accounts and restoring the phone, it was trouble free.