OS using over 80%, new battery draining fast.

[Mariah Anger]

Ok... So I got my S3 back in May 2013. It was my first ever smart phone. The battery life of the stock 2200mAh battery was never great. I was lucky to get 18 hours of moderate use before needing to recharge. Recently it could make it less than 6 hours before needing to recharge. It would drop 3% as soon as I took it off the charger, activate the screen and it'd drop another 2% within 1 minute. I figured 18 hours was normal, but less than 6 hours was just unbearable.

A month ago I purchased a bigger battery, a 7000 mAh ZeroLemon from BasTex Wireless. I've followed their instructions to fully charge and drain the battery to 2% 5 times. I was getting about 2 days of use before needing to recharge on average during that cycle. Now on the 6th battery charge I'm seeing a very high percentage of use by the OS, where in the first 5 cycles of charging/discharging it would use around 18%, and the battery is draining like the old 2200mAh battery.

Can anyone offer any advice on what I can do to restore my phones OS usage to normal without having to chuck my new battery.

Thanks.

 

[LeoRex]

There's something causing a run-away process..... but its buried and you can't see it in those battery stats. Download Wake Detector from the Play Store.... It'll give you a little bit of info. If you are rooted, you'll get a little bit more detailed information as well.

GSAM Battery or Better Battery Stats are excellent as well.

But the key goal is to find out what process Android OS is causing the problem. Look at that last screenshot, specifically at the second half of the "Awake" line... any time you see a big uninterrupted block of 'awake' time when your screen is off (which you have).... something's gone rogue. And you were in good shape up until around the time on that graph that is under the "31s" Up until that point, your phone was only awake when your screen was on. Then you turned off your phone for a while, but you phone never decided to go down for a snooze. Something kept it up.....

Do you remember doing anything around that time? Installing an app, etc?

 

[Mariah Anger]

I don't recall installing any new apps or doing anything of note during that time.

I'm not rooted.

I'll download those apps and post screen shots from them.

 

[GSDer]

If you use something like Battery Monitor Widget http://market.android.com/details?id=ccc71.bmw it'll show you the battery capacity - does it show you 7000 mAh like it should?

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM -0.001 using Tapatalk

 

[Mariah Anger]

GSDer, I will report back with updates after I charge the battery again in regards to the BMW app. I used the wizard to set it up and it said Android would only report the factory battery capacity of 2100 mAh. So I set the battery capacity manually to 7000 mAh.

I wanted the app to accrue some history before posting screen shots from it.

I'm adding screen shots from the first few hours following a full charge with the apps recommended by LeoRex. Battery now at 66% of that charge.

Thank you for the recommendations and assistance so far, I was ignorant of these types of monitoring apps before now.

 

[LeoRex]

Facebook sucks so much... That app is a scourge. I ended up uninstalling it... Instead, I put a bookmark shortcut to their mobile website... No stupid notifications, background services, etc...

But nothing stands out at the moment.. Let it run.

 

[Mariah Anger]

GSam Battery Monitor says, "My samsung SCH-I535 battery averages 2d 1h 45m (18h 46m 0s active usage) on a single charge."

I have noted since installing these battery monitor apps the battery is behaving the way it did fresh out of the box.

One anomaly of note, I have not used my phone radio for 19 hours. I do use the White Noise Lite app overnight during the work week but I specifically only used it one night [~8 hours] during this testing/monitoring period. So this phone radio issue seems to be the possible source of the battery drain.

Please let me know if there are any screen shots that I'm missing, or additional information that is needed.

 

[Mariah Anger]

Update on battery drain. Looking at the battery stats the Android OS usage seems to have returned to normal and hovers around 8%, while Android System uses 18%. However the battery is still draining faster than I think it should.

According to GSam, since last full charge:
Screen 30 hours of awake time using 84.5%
The awake time I find believable since I'm bad about turning the screen off from time to time and I can zone out scrolling through FB for a good while. However the battery % usage seems out of step since I've got the brightness set to ~ 25%.
Phone Radio 38 hours of awake time using 1.4%
This I find unbelievable. I don't play music but for maybe 4 hours a week and not once since the last charge have I played music. Also the % of battery usage doesn't make sense when looking at the awake time.
WiFi Active nearly 30 hours using 0.2%
Active time makes sense, battery % usage doesn't.
App Usage 13.9%
The highest % use is by Android System at 6.8%, then Kernel [Android OS] 1.4%, System [media server] 0.9%, Android Core Apps 0.7%, it keeps going down from there, but nothing is hogging up App Usage like Android System is. Facebook only registers 0.3% and Ingress 0.4%.

The Battery Monitor app is reporting errors when measuring the battery capacity. I do not know if this is a result of my phone not being rooted or the battery is not a true 7000mAh battery. Attaching a screen shot in hopes that someone with more technical know-how can chime in with their interpretation of the information collected by the app.

I installed a battery saver app, GreenPower Free, last night and have it set to automatically disable the WiFi and Data when the screen is off and I've lowered the inactivity timeout for the screen to 30 seconds.

I've turned off all notifications for all the apps that allow me to toggle this function.

I do my best to ensure I turn off the Location [GPS] function unless I'm playing Ingress or using Maps. I may end up paying for the full version of GreenPower to automatically manage that for me.

Before all of this started I was already in the habit of closing all active apps through the "recent apps" screen [long press home button] before locking my screen so that nothing would be running in the background while the screen was off.

It is my understanding that the GPS and WiFi both use the Phone Radio to get their signals but when I've been actively shutting off those functions when not in use it doesn't make sense that A. it would be active for such an extended period of time, and B. that the reported battery % usage is so low considering how long it is awake. Does anyone have any insight on this?

If anyone can suggest other actions I might take to improve the battery life I'd be happy to try them out.