Weird battery issue, says charging, but really not??

[nickacs]

So it's been now 1 week since I've gotten my Bionic and love it. I came across a strange battery issue this past Monday/Tuesday nights and a little last night.

Every night before I go to sleep, I hook up the phone's USB wall charger to charge to 100% by morning. So even if I'm at 0% or 99%, I still do this.
All last week, I did this and every morning woke up to fully charged, 100%.

Here's what's been happening:
Monday morning:
I wake up to 44%. I did run the battery down to 0% before I went to bed, but so what. I did this twice last week and it was fully charged the next morning. Double checked the connection, everything looked good, nothing loose?? The top/right battery icon showed the lighting bolt as if it was charging?
I ended up charging the phone in my car on the way to work and also at work to 100% in about an hour, so I chalked it up as an anonamoly.

Tuesday morning:
Went to bed the night before at about 72% battery, but woke up to now 36%! WTF???? Everything still plugged in with no loose connections. Battery notification bar icon still showed the lighting bolt. Again, charged on the way to work/at work.
I started to think maybe when it reaches 100%, it's going backwards or some battery problem?? I decided to let it charge to 100% at work yesterday and see. Nope, just stayed at 100% for 3hrs straight

This morning:
I charged the phone from about 11-11:30pm downstairs and from about 30% to 60% no problem in about 15mins. Then went to bed last night at about 12:15am with 58% battery. I plugged it up to another wall outlet by the bathroom sink and watched it for about 2mins then went to watch tv for another 10mins. Came back and the battery was now at 55%, lower!!! WTF??? Everything connected, battery notification icon still showing lighting bolt.
I went to the Settings->Battery and clicked on the usage details and saw about 15 apps using battery, but nothing that significant because of all the widgets I have running. I did notice that Backup Assistant is synching from 12am to 6am and thought that there's something strange starting around 12am since I could charge from 11-11:30pm with no problem. So, I changed the setting to 12pm to 6pm in the day since I'm up and I can monitor it better

Woke up this morning and 100%?!?!? So, was it Backup Assistant the 2 nights before? Not sure... But then why didn't this happen every night last week???

I'm baffled, but am going to continue to monitor the next few days/nights. I can't live with waking up to 20-40% battery if it's plugged in ALL night!!

Anyone else have this kind of issue by chance? Thanks!

 

[Hosehead]

Are you using the stock charger that came with the Bionic or a charger from an old device?

Do you have the standard battery or the extended?

 

[nickacs]

I am using the USB wall charger that came with my Droid Incredible previously. This is the one I use on my nightstand.. I opened the one that came with the Bionic and it's down in the kitchen, which is the one I used to charge last night from 11-11:30.
I would say this might be an issue, but since it's USB, does it matter? And all last week and then last night it charged to 100% with using it. But I could try the Bionic one tonight just to see if it makes a difference.

And I'm using just the stock battery, not an extended one.. yet.. hehe..

Maybe this is coincidence, but I did download Widgetlocker Sunday morning and used it into Monday morning. When I woke up with the 44%, I thought this was the problem and un-installed it immediately. However, Monday night and waking up Tuesday morning, that's when I awoke to even worse 36%...

Hmmm... thanks!

 

[ServerTech]

Use the charger which came with the Bionic. The charger which came with the Incredible doesn't put out enough amps to adequately charge the Bionic.

FYI - just look at the specs on each of the chargers. The Bionic puts out nearly 4 times the amount of amps than the Incredible's charger.

 

[nickacs]

Thanks Tech, I'll use the Bionic one tonight by the nightstand and try it out Definitely makes sense..

Thanks

 

[csimme01]

Have done a little research and have some food for thought.
The Bionic comes with a charger rated for 850 ma output.
My wifes BB charger is rated for 750
I have a cigar to USB adapter that is rated at 700
The incredible charger is approx 250
Bottom line if the phone is using more than the charger can output the battery will die even as the phone shows it is charging.
I am running some tests to determine what my phone uses under deferent use but I can tell you this. Even with a 700 ma charger the phone loses battery if I have it in the cat dock running navigation.

 

[KillerG]

Something similar to that happened to me this morning. I woke up and it said I had 100% for quite a while...I was freaking out. No way I wasn't using ANY battery! I switched it on and off, and it reset, but it took a little while for it to reset. And it ended up just dropping a good 5% in like less than a minute and chugging along like normal the rest of the day. Really weird.

 

[jmullinsiu]

OK this make sense. Bionic and og droid use same 850mA charger. When I was using my droid with my friends incredible charger, it would not charge.

Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk

 

[CKwik240]

The incredible charger is approx 250

Actually the Incredible's charger is rated at 1A (1000mA). At least the one that came with my girlfriend's Dinc is. Are you sure you aren't reading off the A/C current rating (200mA)? I can't imagine the Dinc would be able to charge very effectively at only 250mA, especially since it can draw a lot more current (see below).

The original USB spec only calls for 500mA. The use of USB chargers has brought about the need for some changes to the spec, so devices will limit their current draw to 500mA normally, plugging into a dedicated USB charger can trigger a higher current draw. This was employed to allow higher current power through USB but will protect the circuits of older devices that can not provide higher currents and have no circuitry to limit the maximum current output. There are at least two methods to trigger this. The first is to simply short the data terminals on the charger which can signal to certain devices that it is plugged into a dedicated charger. The second is more complicated and I'm not sure what the signal actually does or what additional properties it allows (perhaps concurrent data transmission or something) but it is certainly there as it is printed in the USB specifications.

I've recently tested 3 phones on a few different chargers. The phones include the Bionic, the Incredible, and the DroidX. I tested 3 car chargers and 3 AC chargers.

The 3 car chargers were a 2.1A Scosche, a 1A Scosche, and a 2.1A Bracketron charger. The Bracketron charger was internally modified by shorting the data terminals internally. This was done to trigger the AC charging mode on the Incredible as it appears only to rely on the simpler shorted data pin trigger. It pulled 850mA through the Bracketron charger but only about 400mA through either of the Scosche chargers. The DX and Bionic both pulled 750mA from the Scosche chargers but only 650mA from the Bracketron charger.

The AC chargers were the DX/Bionic OE charger, the OE Incredible charger and a 2.1A Griffin iPad charger. The DX and Bionic pulled 750mA from the OE charger. They also only pulled 650mA from the Incredible's charger. The Incredible only pulled 400mA from the DX/Bionic charger, but pulled 850mA from its own charger. I tested the Griffin charger but I can't recall the specifics in detail and I'm writing this from memory and the results I posted in another forum. I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what I wrote in regards to this charger so I'll probably need to confirm the results I had with this particular charger. On an additional note, the Samsung Galaxy charger doesn't seem to trigger any kind of charging with any of these phones.

All the tests were conducted with a multimeter. A microUSB cable was cut in half to expose the leads and all but the +5V wire were reconnected with test wires. The multimeter was attached to the ends of the +5V wires so I could test the current flow. Since I was using a USB cable for the testing it limited my tests to chargers that provide a USB port.

Each phone was tested without running any apps in the foreground. I didn't reboot to ensure a minimum amount of background applications or anything and the screens were on and usually in the battery section of the about phone section in the setting menu so I could monitor the charging status.

My conclusion is that Motorola and HTC apparently use different dedicated charger detection protocol. I obviously can not speak to all the phones in their respective line-ups. Regardless of the charger's rating, the phone itself limits the current to some maximum value. What I didn't think to check was to see if that value is constant for the phone itself or if it is a maximum on the internal charging circuit plus and current the phone might need to all other operations the phone might be performing (perhaps if the phone is being used) while charging. I didn't approach this very scientifically so there was little methodology to try and isolate such differences. I was more curious about the dedicated charger signalling at the time, but now that I've had a chance to digest some of the results, I'll probably come up with a more elaborate set of tests and conditions when I have some extra time. Hopefully soon though as I'll probably get much busier as I just started the new quarter today and I want to try and get this done before I sell the DX.

Another observation is that since the DX and Bionic both seemed to pull a little less charge when plugged into a charger that uses the shorted data terminal signal, I would probably recommend staying away from such chargers. The Incredible's OE charger definitely uses this type of signalling as I tested it directly a year ago. It should still work to some extent, but assuming there were no other factors that caused the lower current draw, it would appear its, at the very least, going to charge slower.

 

[jrh4054]

Have you tried charging the phone with it off? I always turn my phone off at night while it's charging. Why leave it on?

 

[coastalgal77]

I just found this site and I am so glad! I see it has a lot of great tech peeps which I am not but am learning thanks to you guys! I had a problem with my droid incredible's volume turning off and came on and found if you hold the power button and the volume button at the same time, it will reboot and the volume came on for me! Yaaay tech guys!
Now I came on to find out if anyone was having problems with batteries charging sometimes and not others. (Always seems that after a few years, the part in my phone (ANY PHONE) wears out no matter how careful I am, and it is time to replace my phone!!! Hate that! But it still charges fine on car charger...
This site has that problem here and I love that I have found this site cuzzzz I am sure I will need it for something else soon. (unfortunately but fortunate that I found you guys here!) Thanks!!!!

 

[sbudaj]

So recently, I have been having a similar problem. I have had my Bionic since the beginning and always charge it with the same charger every night. 3 times in the past 2 weeks, I plug my Bionic in as always before I go to sleep. The battery icon has the symbol indicating it is charging. When I wake up, the battery is either dead or way below what it was when I went to sleep. This also happened once to my wife's Bionic last week.

If I pull the battery and plug it back in, it charges just fine for a while. Never had this before the last few weeks.

Anyone have any idea what might be causing this?

Thanks.

 

[Mooncatt]

If you've been charging fine and suddenly it looses power while it's plugged in, it may be nothing more than the USB cable itself going bad. I had that issue on another phone. Stock charger, after market, vehicle, didn't matter. I would get only about a month out of it and then I would get the discharging while charging issue mentioned here. Replacing the USB cable (not the charger itself) would fix it. If I let it go, it would eventually get so bad that the phone wouldn't recognize the cable at all.

 

[Anshaj22]

Same happening with me, sometimes battery don't even charge and sometimes battery goes to 30% and stop, sometimes at 17% and then i am also seeing reverse charging and phone battery goes dead while on charging. some say battery problem, some say your phone's charging jack is faulty. :'(