My Lollipop battery fix. Went from 40% overnight drain to 5%!

[ronnienyc]

My battery wife was fcuked: losing 40%-%50 overnight while it was inactive sitting on the nightstand.
(Factory reset did not help at all!)

Now after futzing with the WIFI setting, last night I lost only 5% total in 8 hours sleep time.
Furthermore battery read 18% remaining at 10:30 PM and still read 18% at 4:17 AM.
Now this is more like what my iPhone 6 gets while sleeping.

What seems to have fixed by battery woes.
I changed the (Advanced) WIFI frequency setting from Automatic to 5Ghz (which would not work at all) and then to 2.4 Ghz only.

As of today I have 87% remaining after 3 hours of casual use (after charging to 100%.) Previously (for the past week since installing Lollipop) I was losing about 25% per hour during casual usage - ridiculously bad battery life.

Hopefully this will work for someone other than myself. I had just listed this thing on Craigslist because I cannot use a phone with 4 hour battery life.

Good luck.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Thanks for sharing. Hopefully this helps a lot of users.

From an AOSP M8

 

[ronnienyc]

Yeah I hope so.
I am fairly positive I did not change any setting other than the WIFI.
I am now down to 77% after 4 hours unplugged. This is WAY better. No contest.
(P.S. I did root, nor have I bothered disabling or deleting Google Fit, etc. as these apps show as inactive and using 0% of the battery.)

 

[crxssi]

I changed the (Advanced) WIFI frequency setting from Automatic to 5Ghz (which would not work at all) and then to 2.4 Ghz only.

I just have generally poor (perhaps mediocre) battery life on the Nexus 5. For example, playing a bubble game for 15 min can wipe 10% of the battery. I use 5Ghz wifi at home and don't notice any additional drain vs. when I was using 2.4Ghz. I also don't notice any additional drain, in general, with 5.0 vs 4.X.

5Ghz has a much shorter range than 2.4Ghz. In your case, it could be that your bedroom was at the extreme limit of your 5Ghz and the phone was dropping in and out, renegotiating a lot, and this was using up your battery. Or you could be having particular issues with 5Ghz interference. Or your router could be a bit wonky at 5Ghz.

 

[ronnienyc]

My crazy battery drain was happening everywhere, so I'm sure it wasn't just an issue with my particular wifi setup at home.
Anyway hopefully this 2.4mhz setup keeps working well. And throughput is great: 30Mbps.
I've read that Google knew about this wifi battery drain issue, and they thought that they had fixed it.

 

[crxssi]

My crazy battery drain was happening everywhere, so I'm sure it wasn't just an issue with my particular wifi setup at home.
Anyway hopefully this 2.4mhz setup keeps working well. And throughput is great: 30Mbps.
I've read that Google knew about this wifi battery drain issue, and they thought that they had fixed it.

I have seen some posts on various types of Android devices that simply do not work properly with certain brands of 5Ghz routers. Certainly not limited to Android 5.0, but there might be some additional issues. So many devices, so many possible combination problems