[Help][50% SOLVED] LTE = random heavy battery drain aka "plummet"

[eyecon82]

This will probably sound crazy but I just read through the whole thread and was wondering if plummet was an issue only with white S3 phones... I recently got one myself and am frustrated with the issue. Can anyone reply if you guys have a non white phone but still see the issue? I really love my white S3 but was thinking of exchanging for another color as I am within 30 days. Appreciate any comment here

It's am issue with blue ones too

 

[KreepyKen]

For me the "fix" was to turn off Auto rotation of the screen. I got the AT&T update and somehow inadvertently turned the auto rotate off. When I turned it back on, had two battery drains in 24 hours. Turned it off, no more battery drains and battery life good.
Although I hope they fix it, no rotation is a PIA!

That would be shocking and just weird if true. I'll have to test both settings next week and see if there is a difference for me. Thanks for the suggestion!

Nope...didn't work for me. I had the plummet with the screen rotation on and off this past week. Would have been nice if that fixed it. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

 

[hulimari]

well, coming from the iphone world, I really loved this phone untill i hit the plummet gate... anyway I am off to get a replacement today. lets hope the new one turns out to be a better one

 

[castorjay]

I have the exact same problem as OP. I'm glad to hear it is a bug rather than how the battery life was intended.

I live and work in areas where I don't get 4G and the plummet happens. I recently wen't on a 4 day business trip where I had full bars of 4G the entire time. I probably could have went the whole trip without having to plug it up once. If there was just a simple way to toggle 4G off, I think my problem would be solved. I've tried the custom Access Point route but I didn't have any luck with that.

 

[sieklucki1]

I'm also having the exact same problem as the OP. Exact same graphs that he posted.

Anyone have any update on this?

 

[KreepyKen]

I'm also having the exact same problem as the OP. Exact same graphs that he posted.

Anyone have any update on this?

Not really. Although I had posted in the past that the plummet only happens to me when there are updates available from Google Play. That's no longer true. It happened to me twice this past week and there were no updates available (sometimes the update wouldn't show up until I rebooted the phone, but even after a reboot, the two times this week didn't return any updates).

This I do know: It only happens to me at work and when I'm connected to Wi-Fi. I still think something is causing the phone to not be able to reconcile which network (LTE or Wi-Fi) it's supposed to use. I don't have LTE where I live and it's never once happened to me at home. It occurs several times a week to me at work, which is in an LTE area.

What seems to work best is to simply restart the phone every morning. What I did a few times this week was to restart my phone as I'm walking from my car to my office. Only once has the plummet happened after a restart, and that was over a month ago.

I'm still holding out hope that when 4.1 is finally released by AT&T, whatever bug in the kernel that is causing this is resolved.

 

[jeffreii]

Not really. Although I had posted in the past that the plummet only happens to me when there are updates available from Google Play. That's no longer true. It happened to me twice this past week and there were no updates available (sometimes the update wouldn't show up until I rebooted the phone, but even after a reboot, the two times this week didn't return any updates).

This I do know: It only happens to me at work and when I'm connected to Wi-Fi. I still think something is causing the phone to not be able to reconcile which network (LTE or Wi-Fi) it's supposed to use. I don't have LTE where I live and it's never once happened to me at home. It occurs several times a week to me at work, which is in an LTE area.

What seems to work best is to simply restart the phone every morning. What I did a few times this week was to restart my phone as I'm walking from my car to my office. Only once has the plummet happened after a restart, and that was over a month ago.

I'm still holding out hope that when 4.1 is finally released by AT&T, whatever bug in the kernel that is causing this is resolved.

Like you I'm in the habit of just preemptively restarting the phone. First thing every morning, after turning off my alarm, I restart the phone. This generally gets me through the day. If I think about it I'll restart again around lunchtime. It's a minor annoyance but pretty much eliminates the plummet.

I also set up a "low battery notification" in Light Flow. I made it at 50% battery so that I get a little alert when I hit that threshold. If I have forgotten to restart the phone, the alert will warn me of the plummet and I can salvage the situation before my battery is dead.

Again, this is still quite annoying but very manageable and with a little preemptive action, 90% avoidable. If you're willing to disable LTE...100% avoidable...but I'm not. May as well get a Nexus 4 if that's ok!

 

[sieklucki1]

Thanks both for the response.

I am going to proceed with rebooting the phone regularily.

Has anyone actually initiated a support ticket with AT&T and/or Samsung?



The sawtooth in the attached picture (near the end) seems to show the same sort of issue you're seeing.

 

[KreepyKen]

Well, I updated to JB on Wednesday night, and on Friday, I had the plummet happen again. My overall battery usage has gotten a bit worse since the update, too, so I decided to just give it a good factory reset and see if that helps.

 

[jeffreii]

Well, I updated to JB on Wednesday night, and on Friday, I had the plummet happen again. My overall battery usage has gotten a bit worse since the update, too, so I decided to just give it a good factory reset and see if that helps.

That's definitely bad news. I haven't gotten around to updating yet - just lazy I guess - but hopefully others will confirm whether or not they have the plummet post-update so we can get a consensus.

 

[haveagr8day]

I am also running jellybean 4.1.1 on a rogers canada galaxy s3 (i747m) and have this same issue with it. Some days I can use it all day with very little battery drop, and other days it is never touched and the battery is almost dead by the end of the day. Only a reboot seems to fix the sharp drops in the battery, will try running without LTE for a few days and see if it happens anymore. Samsung Push, ChatOn, and Google Now are all disabled.

Edit : With regards to a couple other possibilities mentioned in the thread, I have gsiff_daemon disabled and Google play set to never auto update. Phone also becomes relatively hot during the drain, however, both cpu monitoring applications and the top command show almost no cpu usage whatsoever, and them being in the lowest possible power states.

 

[sieklucki1]

Bad news.

I've upgraded to Android 4.1.2. Cyanogen 10.0.0-d2att. Unfortunately, the plummet just happened.

 

[eyecon82]

Bad news.

I've upgraded to Android 4.1.2. Cyanogen 10.0.0-d2att. Unfortunately, the plummet just happened.

is it touchwiz based? this has shown to only happen to TW based roms as of now......

 

[Shawhan Proctor]

My current and former S3 both have battery plummet, you are not alone.

I have done everything suggested here with no real luck one way or the other. I don't even recall getting normal battery life while LTE was disabled.

 

[KreepyKen]

Yeah...problem is still around. I did a factory reset this weekend, and had the plummet twice this week. So no joy. Have any of you reported this to Samsung?

 

[Archienj7]

Have you guys reset the battery as well after a factory reset? It helped mine tremendously even though I am a light user.

 

[Kelly Kearns]

So I had the battery plummet last night, 8 hours and my phone woke me up saying the battery was low. I've been getting 18-19 hrs use, about 5-6 hours of screen on and I had 20 mins of screen on. I live in a LTE area and I generally have good signal. The only thing I had changed was getting an Otterbox Commander case and turning pin lock on. While my screen was black all night, my phone was waking us about 20-25 times during the night, according to battery history. My mobile network bar in battery history was a tan color. I took my case off and it has gone to yellow and green at times. AT&T is sending me a new battery, I reported this to Samsung. I only had the phone for a week before JB came out but I'm still wondering if it has anything to do with JB. I'm really thinking about trading my phone in and just sticking with ICS.

 

[KreepyKen]

So I had the battery plummet last night, 8 hours and my phone woke me up saying the battery was low. I've been getting 18-19 hrs use, about 5-6 hours of screen on and I had 20 mins of screen on. I live in a LTE area and I generally have good signal. The only thing I had changed was getting an Otterbox Commander case and turning pin lock on. While my screen was black all night, my phone was waking us about 20-25 times during the night, according to battery history. My mobile network bar in battery history was a tan color. I took my case off and it has gone to yellow and green at times. AT&T is sending me a new battery, I reported this to Samsung. I only had the phone for a week before JB came out but I'm still wondering if it has anything to do with JB. I'm really thinking about trading my phone in and just sticking with ICS.

Did you look at your battery usage to see if it was a constant drain or if the plummet got triggered at a specific point? The waking isn't really a problem. All the polling you have set for email, facebook, updates, etc. will wake the phone up every few minutes.

I am intrigued by your comment about changing to PIN lock, though. My phone did not suffer from the plummet for the first few months, then suddenly started (it started with ICS, so it's not isolated to JB). Originally, I had used the Pattern Lock, but then at some point switched to PIN. I don't remember when that was or if it coincides with when the plummet started, but it's an interesting thing to test.

Unfortunately (not really unfortunate), I'm off of work until January 2, so I can't test it until then. But when I get back to work in January, I'll try switching back to Pattern Lock and see if there's any change. That would be weird if it was part of the equation, but I'm willing to try anything.

In the meantime, over the last two weeks, I've gone back and forth with restarting the phone as I'm walking into the office. The plummet happened twice, both times were days when I did not restart the phone in the morning. So I've gotten at least some relief by restarting the phone each morning (once I get into an LTE area).

 

[Kelly Kearns]

It was like the second I took my phone off the charger, it went down hill fast. Today I haven't gotten great battery, just about 9 hours, but I've also been in a lot of bad signal area today and I have removed the PIN and the commander case.

Here is my battery graph for the plummet and then the 9 hour battery I got today.

 

[KreepyKen]

Have you guys reset the battery as well after a factory reset? It helped mine tremendously even though I am a light user.

This issue isn't about poor battery performance. There is a sudden rapid decrease in battery % that gets triggered by something, but no one can figure out what that trigger is. I think what we can all agree on is that it always happens in an LTE area when Wifi is turned on & connected. On the surface, this doesn't make sense. If you connect to wifi, the phone will automatically turn off mobile data. But this plummet doesn't happen in non-LTE areas. The phone should be ignoring the LTE, but it only happens when LTE is present. So I believe that some process kicks in and the phone gets confused on whether it should be using Wifi or LTE. I think it's trying to access/find the LTE tower, but since mobile data is turned off, it won't find it...so it just sits there spinning away looking for something it will never find...draining the battery in the process.

The problem is not with the battery, as I've had it happen with both my batteries (one of which was brand new). There are a number of screenshots in this thread that will show you what the plummet looks like. It's got to be a glitch of some sort. Another thing to point out is that when the plummet does not happen, either screen or standby is the #1 battery user. But when the plummet occurs, it's the Android System (kernel). So the kernel is freaking out about something related to LTE + WiFi. Other than that, no one can figure out what causes it.

Mine started suddenly after about 3 months of flawless operation. I'm going to try switching my lock screen from PIN back to Pattern and see if that makes a difference.