Battery Draining 50% overnight

Jiriho

Member
Mar 18, 2016
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Hi,

I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 5 (about 2 weeks ago). It has been working pretty well, though recently I noticed some pretty severe battery drain (around 15% or so overnight). When I looked at the battery usage it said that email sync from the stock Samsung email app was using around 50% of the battery - more than anything else (I have my Gmail account and an exchange account linked). So, I set my sync schedule to manual to see if this would fix the issue. No go... Still the same amount of battery drain and email sync was still the culprit with the same usage statistics. This did not make sense to me at all, so I decided to do a factory reset of the phone and set up as a new phone. I reinstalled all the apps I had (I don't use many 3rd party apps, no games, nothing really non-essential), and re-set up my emails. I charged the phone to 100% and left if unplugged overnight to observe if this had solved the problem. Note that I always turn off GPS overnight. I also kept my wifi on during the night. When I woke 8 hours later the phone had drained down to 53%!!!! When I looked at the usage statistics email sync was not there anymore (so I guess that problem has gone), but more puzzling, there was nothing in the usage statistics to implicate what caused the huge battery drain - just a steady decrease over the time period.

Usage stats:

Cell standby: 2%
Android system: 1%
Chrome: 1%
Device idle: 1%
Screen: 1%
Android OS: 1%

And that's all....

I am pretty concerned about this, firstly seeing as the usage stats do not match up to the amount of batter drain, and also seeing as this happened directly after a factory reset - isn't doing a factory reset supposed to solve problems like battery drain?

I have now downloaded a 3rd party monitoring app to see if that can give me a little more info.

If anyone has any idea what the problem could be, and how I can solve this that would be great.

Thanks!
 

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Tonight, charge it up and when you go to bed, put it in Airplane Mode, and again make sure the WiFi is off. Looks like the WiFi bug, but it could also just be a weak Cellular signal. If you wake up at 90% or more, then the next night, try turning off the "master sync" switch (use two fingers to pull down notifications, and find the one that says Sync, with two circular arrows). Try leaving cellular and WiFi on, and turning off that master sync. By isolating what you're isolating each night and then looking that the battery usage in the morning, you should be able to narrow down where exactly the problem lies. Good luck!
 
Thanks for your suggestion. I will try this over the next 2 nights. This battery drain is very confusing as I basically have the same settings as before the factory reset, and all of a sudden I'm experiencing huge drain. So, are you suggesting that the problem could either be a bug with the WiFi or with the master sync?

Also, I have a fairly weak 4G signal in my area. When I first got my phone I noticed a fairly rapid battery drain, and decided this was because of the 4G constantly pinging to different towers to get a signal. So I set my phone set to '3G only' to get a stable 3 or 4 bars of phone signal. The issue then seemed to resolve. I have had my phone set to '3G only' ever since.
 
Ok, so here is an update.

I noticed that when I change my mobile network from '3g only' to 4g/3g/2g (auto connect) the unusual battery drain stopped. I then changed my mobile network back to '3g only' and once again the huge battery drain commenced. Initially I thought that maybe this was happening because the 3g net work signal was weak compared to the 4g signal, but actually the opposite is true. The reason why I was using the '3g only' network setting was because I get a stable 3-4 bars, whereas on 4g I only got 1 bar. Furthermore, I had it set on '3g only' for about a week prior with no battery issues - why all of a sudden?

So anyway, I kept observing this happening for the next day until last night, when the unusual battery drain on '3g only' seemed to suddenly stop. I charged my phone and left it unplugged overnight and left it set on '3g only'. The next morning I woke up and I had lost only 2% of battery! Woohoo, problem fixed! Hmm, not so much... I then realised that while I was getting phone signal on '3g only', my phone had suddenly lost the ability to connect to mobile data. I switched to the 4g network and data came back, went back to the '3g only' network and again, no data.

I decided to factory reset the phone again, after doing this I was able to once again get a data connection while on '3g only', however the unusual battery drain issue while on this network setting has returned.

I think that this phone may be faulty, or at least the '3g only' setting is faulty.

Let me know if you guys have any suggestions as to what might be causing this strange phone behaviour, or if you just think my phone is faulty.

Thanks!
 
It could also be a bad tower. Call your provider and explain the steps you've taken and get them to open a ticket to have an engineer look at whatever tower(s) you're connecting to. It could be your phone, but may as well make sure before going without for a week.