Anyone else have battery drain on "high speed" car/DC chargers?

[rnelsonee]

So I noticed I'm losing 9%/hr when my Moto X is attached to my car charger. And that's with no Bluetooth, streaming, GPS, etc and the screen is off (oh, and Motorola Assist is off too). So something's definitely out of the ordinary. On top of that, I have a "high-speed" Motorola-branded charger (the very popular model that shows up on this site's shopping site and Amazon as #1 - 950mA).

I have a new high speed charger coming today, but am wondering - does the Moto X maybe have a protective charging circuit? Is 950mA too much (new one coming has 1.5A)? I don't mind experimenting with this new charger but I don't want to damage anything. If anyone has this same problem or ideas, just let me know!

Thanks!

 

[JudH]

Have you verified there is power available at the cigarette/power outlet? Is this with the car ignition on? Some cars kill the power there if the ignition is off.

Is the phone charging with an AC charger? That would rule out the usb port on the phone leaving the cigarette/power adapter or the cable.

And no you can't hurt the phone having more amps than needed--the charger circuit in the phone will limit the draw to what it needs.

 

[rnelsonee]

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, there is power - both the charger indicates this (there's an LED) and probably more importantly, the notification icon on the phone's screen shows the charging state (battery with the lightning bolt in it). And the car is on.

And yeah, wall chargers work fine, which is why I ordered a new cable. It happens to work with everything else, but who knows - maybe there's tighter tolerances now or something. I was just curious if I was the only one, because I'd rather play it safe and buy a normal charger than risk a high-ampere one.

 

[duner53]

This sounds like an issue with it charging at the "USB" rate instead of the "AC" rate. These was some discussion of this in this thread. I had the issue with it charging at the lower rate off my battery pack and car charger, but it would charge fine off of most AC USB chargers (although I do have one that it charged at the slower rate with). I read elsewhere about people fixing this by disabling the contacts on the USB cord that are for data transfer; however, I didn't really want to half-ruin any of my cables. I fixed the issue with an adapter plug that basically does this, and keeps me from having to modify my cables. I got this one off eBay. It's far from an ideal solution, but it's the best I've been able to find.