Strangely horrible battery life while on standby?

[SR4]

Last night before I went to bed, my phone was at 98%. I woke up about five hours later and I was at 73%. How could my phone possibly use that much battery when it's not even being used? Sure there were some background processes going, I had just restarted my phone and didn't kill any processes... But this just seems like it went down a bit much in 5 hours.

 

[s2h2golf]

What type of background processes? How long have you had this phone and is this the first time you noticed this? Did you install any new apps that would be constantly updating? Are you in an area that has poor/fair coverage?

I've had a phone completely drain overnight because it was searching for a signal - apparently one of the towers nearby had an issue or something, so it started roaming. That's happened a couple of times.

Unless you have a lot of widgets constantly updating, or your email is set to check every 30 minutes or more, you should lose about 1% for every hour it is in standby - so after five hours it should have been around 90% when you woke up. If you didn't let the battery fully charge before setting it up, your battery may not have been fully calibrated. Check out these instructions for calibrating your battery:

Recalibrating Your Battery... - xda-developers

 

[stnguyen09]

Yeah a drop like that is kind of dramatic...try setting your Wifi sleep policy to "Never" if you're in a location where you can always be connected. Wifi uses less power than maintaining a 3G connection. It can be found in the Wifi settings menu, just hit the menu button and hit Advanced.

Also, if you're running a boatload of widgets that continuously refresh or a live wallpaper that is pretty processor intensive then your battery life will suffer as well.

 

[Lyanheart]

Sounds like you already figured it out. When you leave a bunch of stuff running in the background, maybe using wifi, data, or gps, it really drains the battery even if the screen is off. I put my phone in airplane mode when I'm sleeping (when I don't want to turn it completely off) and hit the task-killer. Stops most of the battery drain.

 

[SR4]

I really have no idea what kind of background processes. It was probably a whole lot of stuff since I had not killed any processes since I restarted my phone. But I wouldn't think it would have been anything demanding data.

I've had the phone since launch day. The battery life never has been too good, but I've never noticed a huge drop like this before. And no, I haven't installed anything new in a couple days.

The coverage around my house is perfectly fine. I usually have anywhere from 3 bars to full coverage in 3G.

I don't have it to where it automatically updates emails. I never receive notifications for new emails.

I don't have a bunch of widgets running either. I've got the News/Weather/Calendar widget, the Social Widget, ESPN Scores widget, Google Voice, and the Weather Channel, and all of those don't update on their own except for Voice (which wouldn't have been updating).

GPS was off. Wifi was off. It was running off of 3G with the Sync setting turned on.

 

[s2h2golf]

Since nothing has really changed for a while and this is outside the norm for your phone, I would keep watching it and if it continues, I would think about recalibrating the battery or trying a new one. All of those widgets can be set to update at different times, so you may want to look at your settings. For example, Weather Channel can be set to update weather every 2 hours instead of every 15 minutes. Same with the ESPN widget.

 

[TheBronze]

Please people. Read up on battery technology before referencing r3tarded posts about "Calibrating" your battery. There is no such thing. There may be some merit to letting it run down so the monitor has a better sampling of the battery life, but even that is questionable since it is more than likely just a volt amp meter that is doing the lifting.

 

[T4RBoarder]

My phone has officially been off the charger for a 1hr 45min and it is down to 76% with nothing done but a few texts. Something has to be wrong.

 

[myk26]

OR...you thought you pulled the pulled at 100% but didn't (?).

Mine went from 100% @ 7:30am to just above 75% currently (7 hrs later) with Auto-Sync and GPS/Wi-Fi on.

 

[T4RBoarder]

It was definitely at 100% I checked it twice. Down again to 70% after a 20 minute phone conversation

 

[retrogreq]

with gps off, wifi on, email updating every half hour, and sitting in standby overnight (7 hours) i go from 100% (i unplug before i go to bed) to 99%
light to medium usage, and i can make my phone last 2 and a half days before it dies

 

[s2h2golf]

r3tarded

Nice.

I just flashed a new ROM and did not let my battery fully charge (didn't follow my own advice). Just typing this burned up 5% of my battery. It will take a couple of days to get my battery life back to where it was before (by re-calibrating!!!). It's happened before and I went from losing 50% of my battery in 17 hrs to just 25% in 17 hrs. I guess re-calibrating just isn't real.