Help me diagnose sudden, drastic battery drain

[whitenack]

Yesterday and again today, I noticed my Nexus 5 getting very hot. I pulled it out of my pocket and noticed nothing out of the ordinary, other than the temperature and the battery drain. Since it is a Nexus 5, and there seems to be some issue with 5.0.1 and a memory leak, I wiped the data partition and rebooted. Unfortunately, the battery drain and heat were still there. I am in an area with poor cell reception, so I switched to airplane mode (with wifi on) even though I am always in an area with poor cell reception during the day and that hasn't caused these symptoms in the past. After the switch to airplane mode, the symptoms seemed to subside for a while, but after a few hours they returned. This morning, I return to work and the symptoms start right back up. I noticed a new symptom this morning that I hadn't realized was happening yesterday: my phone kept dropping and reconnecting to the wifi network. I assume that constantly losing and reconnecting wifi connection would be a battery drain, and today I had several drops in just a few minutes, but yesterday's battery history doesn't show many disconnects, or at least enough to tie them to the battery drain.

I'm not rooted, and don't want to just for this issue (especially if this might be a warranty issue), so wakelock detector isn't an option for me. Is there any other option that I can try to diagnose this problem?

I have included the battery history screenshots from yesterday and this morning.

Yesterday...


This morning...

 

[Golfdriver97]

I wiped the data partition and rebooted

Did you mean you wiped the cache? If so, did you do this in recovery?

Have you considered a reset?

 

[whitenack]

Did you mean you wiped the cache? If so, did you do this in recovery?

Have you considered a reset?

Yes, sorry. I meant wiped the cache partition. And yes, I did this in recovery.

I haven't considered a factory reset yet. I am hoping it is some of easy fix like a buggy app or setting that I need to adjust.

 

[whitenack]

Did you mean you wiped the cache? If so, did you do this in recovery?

Have you considered a reset?

Thanks for the reply. Yes, sorry. I meant wiped the cache partition. And yes, I did this in recovery.

I haven't considered a factory reset yet. I am hoping it is some of easy fix like a buggy app or setting that I need to adjust.

I have just disabled Tasker. I have some profiles and triggers that occur when I connect and disconnect to my current wifi network, so maybe the constant changing of profiles is causing the battery drain? That wouldn't fix the wifi connection issue, but maybe that is a problem with the router and not the phone.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, sorry. I meant wiped the cache partition. And yes, I did this in recovery.

I haven't considered a factory reset yet. I am hoping it is some of easy fix like a buggy app or setting that I need to adjust.

I have just disabled Tasker. I have some profiles and triggers that occur when I connect and disconnect to my current wifi network, so maybe the constant changing of profiles is causing the battery drain? That wouldn't fix the wifi connection issue, but maybe that is a problem with the router and not the phone.

In your WiFi settings, do you have avoid poor connections enabled? What is the frequency of the router? Is the phone on auto detection? Perhaps setting it to whatever the router is set at (as I recall 2.5 GHz is fine in most use cases).

 

[whitenack]

In your WiFi settings, do you have avoid poor connections enabled? What is the frequency of the router? Is the phone on auto detection? Perhaps setting it to whatever the router is set at (as I recall 2.5 GHz is fine in most use cases).

I'm running lollipop, which doesn't have the setting to disable poor connections. The router runs 2.4, and I have my phone set to auto. I'll try setting it on 2.4 and see if that helps. I currently have it in airplane mode to see if that will calm it down.

 

[Javier P]

Such a bad signal is going to use a lot of battery, but there must be something else.

Looking at your graphs it seems that something is keeping your phone awake most of the time. You could boot your phone in safe mode to see if there's a downloaded app doing that.

Are you using any Tasker or security apps? Stop them for a while and see if it makes a difference.

Checking, or even disabling, background and location settings for a while could help.

 

[whitenack]

Such a bad signal is going to use a lot of battery, but there must be something else.

Looking at your graphs it seems that something is keeping your phone awake most of the time. You could boot your phone in safe mode to see if there's a downloaded app doing that.

Are you using any Tasker or security apps? Stop them for a while and see if it makes a difference.

Checking, or even disabling, background and location settings for a while could help.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I have tasker installed, and it has profiles and triggers that fire when wifi is disconnected. I disabled tasker at the same time I put the phone in airplane mode. How do I boot into safe mode?

After an hour or so in airplane mode, things calmed down...



I have just switched it off of airplane mode (but keeping tasker disabled) to see if the problem returns. I'll keep you all in the loop.

 

[Javier P]

https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2852139?hl=en

Same thing. Your phone is awake most of the time. You can see that with aeroplane mode just GPS is running. But when WiFi is On you've got a background process eating your battery alive.

Check your sync/upload/update settings. There's something wrong. Some app is running wild in the background.

Maybe you could start unchecking syncs in your Google account for a couple of hours. Google + can do funny things and I've read about weird drains because they had emojis in their contacts! . You never know.

 

[Javier P]

Something came to my mind. Do you have a weather widget? Did you have a lockscreen widget working before lollipop?

 

[whitenack]

Something came to my mind. Do you have a weather widget? Did you have a lockscreen widget working before lollipop?

No, no lockscreen or weather widgets.

More data to share. After posting the last message, I turned airplane mode off. The phone immediately started getting hot again and the battery started dropping. However, I left for lunch at 12 and was gone for about an hour. While at lunch, I was connected to a different wifi network. As you see in the battery history below, the battery drain immediately levels out, even though the phone stays awake quite a bit. I came back from lunch around 1, and you can see the battery drain start up again for a moment but then gets better (probably due to the poor cell signal). Also, while at lunch, you can see that the phone stays awake quite a bit even though the battery doesn't drain very much.



I now have airplane mode back on, but wifi on, to see if I can further isolate the issue. I'll also see if I can boot into safe mode and see what I can see.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Gsam might help here. Its a battery monitoring app. Free on Play.

From an AOSP M8

 

[whitenack]

Well, I jinxed it. The drain is back, along with whatever is keeping it awake.

 

[whitenack]

I was running out of juice, so I charged it up briefly and then rebooted into safe mode. Looks like the phone is still staying awake. See below. I'll install the gsam program and see what that turns up. I'll also look into disabling some of the syncing parts of google like google+.