Fixed my Battery drain issue!

[Grenex]

This is a long thread because I have a lot of detail, so bare with me!

I got my phone at Walmart on saturday morning of launch and the battery was 100% DEAD upon purchase! Wouldn't even power up. they had to plug it in and charge it just to activate it for me. I had enough juice to make it out to the car and put it on the car charger for the 15 min ride home, and then charged it on/off over the course of the day until that night when it finally had time to go to 100%

Ever since my Droid1 phone, my usage is "average" and includes Facebook 3-4 times per day, texting, constant Gchat sessions, approx 10 min of gaming, light web browsing, a lot of audio streaming/playback, some youtube, photos and gallery use, sync and use of 3 gmail accounts, and Google latitue (always on)
I always keep my Bluetooth, Wifi, and GPS on at all times on my phones

I never had great success with my battery on the Charge since I bought it several days ago. I live in a 3G area and work in a 4G area.
On 3G network my battery would drain at a rate of 10% per hour giving me 10 hours or less of use
On 4G network my battery would drain at a rate of 20% per hour giving me 5 hours or less of use

I tried everything on the phone to fix the battery issue. I ran Advanced task killer (which had helped my battery life on other phones), installed JuiceDefender, shut off Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS. removed all widgets and turned screen brightness down to manual with the lowest level. With the phone unused/untouched for an hour, it still continued to drain at the same rates listed above.

I went to Verizon and had the battery replaced. This yielded the same drain times.
I followed the forum on how to "condition your battery". No luck Same drain.

I was ready to return the phone and try another one, but decided first to do a full factory reset, keep all apps, services, widgets, etc. OFF and see how the phone did. If battery was better I would slowly add items back and find the drain. If the battery still drained fast, i was going to return the phone for a new one and try again.

I did the factory reset, and only configured one of the gmail accounts. I removed all widgets, turned screen auto bright off and set it to the dimmest level, turned off GPS, Bluetooth, and Wifi. I let all of the apps reinstall from the market, but made sure none of them were configured to pull any data in any way. I also removed Advnaced Task Killer and NoLED after they were restored.

My phone was doing pretty well! I was only draining about 3% per hour on 3G!! MUCH BETTER than the prior 10% per hour! I put the phone on the charger and went to bed for the night. The following is my experience today:

• 6:00am I unplug the phone with 100% charge
• 8:00am I start off on my way to work and do a couple of phone calls, some youtube streaming, and checking e-mail
• 9:00am I am at work now (4G area) and with three hours off the charger I am around 87% battery! I set up my other Gmail accounts and start using Gchat and text messaging
• 11:00am I am now seeing an average drain of 5% per hour on 4G. Still not bad! battery is at 75%
• 11:30am I turn on GPS, Bluetooth, and WiFi
• 1:30pm I am around 67% battery Still only a 5% drain and doing well! I turn on auto screen brighness
• 4:00pm I am now around 40% battery after 10 hours of use Apparently the LCD brightness has a slightly bigger drain. I enable all my widgets
• 5:00pm I am leaving work. Battery is at 32% I make several phone calls on the way home and switch from 4G to 3G with no issues in transit. I text and e-mail
• 6:30pm I arrive home and I have 23% battery left
• 7:00pm I turn on Facebook app and log in. I forgot to disable polling so it pulls some notifications for a bit while I am using it. I use some heavy internet browsing and make some phone calls. I am now at 17% battery left
• 8:15pm I am now shopping for food and using an app for my food list. I am now at 3% battery life after making a quick call and using my device a lot for my food list.
• 8:20pm I am back in the car and plug the phone with with just 2% left after 14 hours of use!

Conclusion:
I got a full 14 hours of battery life today while using in 4G area! So much better than the prior 5 Hours!!
Factory reset did the trick. I have yet to set up google Latitude, weatherbug, Advanced Task Killer, or NoLED. These are the last items on the list. I now believe that one of these is the issue. Despite great success in the past with ATK, it might have been my root cuase of the drain.

I will continue testing tomorrow and thru the weekend and post any additional info.

 

[DroidXcon]

Rule of thumb,,,,,always ATK's fault

 

[Grenex]

Rule of thumb,,,,,always ATK's fault

I have seen ATK actaully extend battery life on other phones, but I really do believe it might have been the culprit here.

BTW: I did use the task manager to close apps about 3-4 times during the day, but nothing major.

 

[hooskins]

I'm pretty sure the two main culprits were auto brightness and atk.

 

[hooskins]

I love auto brightness btw. I always am close to a charger so itz not a big deal for me.

 

[ellje]

I got 13hrs today and the only difference was that I am running the weatherbug widget. It's looking like ATK, to me!!!

Thanks for the heads up! This may solve a lot of questions for people.

 

[aquajon974]

are you using any sort of task killer now? i have had ok battery life with my charge, i am in 4g part of the day but at work bounce in and out of it allday..

 

[ellje]

are you using any sort of task killer now? i have had ok battery life with my charge, i am in 4g part of the day but at work bounce in and out of it allday..

I'll chime in since I got similar battery life as the OP.

I did not use any additional task killer app, just the one that was preinstalled on the phone. I did clear my RAM about 6-times yesterday, although I'm not sure I saw significant improvement with doing so. I'm going to test different scenarios over the next week to see if I can improve upon the 13-hrs that I had yesterday.

 

[deadpenguins]

I used to have atk but uninstalled it and I do not use weather bug but I am going to try the factory reset anyway cause I am desperate and tired of constantly turning off my data! Good post and congrats on the fixed phone!

 

[lpsquall]

Thank you for the detailed post. Hopefully this helps some Droid Charge users. Unfortunately, I did perform a factory reset and did not have ATK installed and my battery life didn't last me 14 hours like you.

Has anyone else tried factory reset and had similar results?

 

[deadpenguins]

I just factory reset. I have done nothing to my phone other than set the brightness low and remove widgets from my homescreen. I'm at work for another couple of hours and the reception here is rather poor so I will post my results after I spend some time with the phone in a more consistent network area.

 

[ellje]

Fwiw, I'm doing a battery test on 3g today. So far I have 3hrs and only 5% battery depletion with basically the same setup and usage of my 4g test yesterday.

 

[deadpenguins]

What the heck, an hour after my reset my phone has just started to downlaod and install all apps that I had before the reset. Is this supposed to happen?

For the past 80min I've barely used my phone and I have gone from 60%-35%. This phone's going back.

 

[lpsquall]

Thats what was happening to me. I barely did anything and my battery was depleting really fast.

What the heck, an hour after my reset my phone has just started to downlaod and install all apps that I had before the reset. Is this supposed to happen?

For the past 80min I've barely used my phone and I have gone from 60%-35%. This phone's going back.

 

[superstar1213]

I'm glad to see someone who went through the work of narrowing down the culprit to ATK. As an agent I have seen numerous customers come my way with complaints of battery life and phone doing weird things in general. 99% of the time I've found that they all had ATK installed on their device. Reps in store are actually taking their phones on the day of the sale and installing this on their device, which I think is wrong to begin with. Come to find that it seems that this app is responsible for many device issues. It does more harm than good. Great post.

 

[Grenex]

What the heck, an hour after my reset my phone has just started to downlaod and install all apps that I had before the reset. Is this supposed to happen?

For the past 80min I've barely used my phone and I have gone from 60%-35%. This phone's going back.

Yes! Once you sign into google, the market will "restore" all of your apps. This is why on my original post I said I let that happen, removed a few that I thought would cause issues or would auto launch, DID NOT configure or launch others.

THEN I charged 100% and started my testing.

 

[superstar1213]

What the heck, an hour after my reset my phone has just started to downlaod and install all apps that I had before the reset. Is this supposed to happen?

For the past 80min I've barely used my phone and I have gone from 60%-35%. This phone's going back.

This is a feature built into FroYo, which you can turn off. Settings>Privacy>Automatic restore. I find that it congests your bandwith after the restore and tries to restore all your apps at once. I usually cancel them all and install one or two at a time.

 

[Grenex]

Day 2 results

Day 2: Same config as last night and after almost 5 hours off the charger I have 70% battery life left! I am going to configure latitude, NoLED and Weatherbug shortly and monitor the last bits I need

 

[brpost]

Day 2: Same config as last night and after almost 5 hours off the charger I have 70% battery life left! I am going to configure latitude, NoLED and Weatherbug shortly and monitor the last bits I need

From somenone that is watching the battery life threads very closely, and a potentioal Charge buyer, I want to thank you, Grenex, for the time you are taking to investigate this and, more importantly, reporting back to us all.

 

[reflekt2099]

I also wanna say that I get similar battery results.

with normal usage (i.e., web browsing, words with friends games all day, texting, around 10-15 phone calls, etc) from 7:30AM (off the charger) till around 9-10PM, my battery gets down to 5%. That's around 15 Hours of battery life. If i wanna have enough juice to use the phone in the later hours of the night (10PM-2AM), I just leave it on the charger during the day on my computer.

it's been pretty consistent like this every day the past week.