Gotta Get to the Bottom of This Battery Drainage! Pics

[monicakm]

My S5 gave me such better battery life and I have far fewer apps on my S7 than I did my S5. But the ones I do have on my S7 are the same as on the S5. Yes, I keep Location/GPS on. Yes, I keep BT on. I need these. They were on all the time on my S5. I normally don't have Wifi on but I did on my S5. I have syncing on for email and calendar etc. Same with the S5. I'm not going to dumb down my smartphones just to enhance the battery life. Shouldn't have to and didn't have to with the S5. I've got chargers on both ends of the house and in the car so I'm not in danger of my phone dying, I just expect more out of this battery. I'd be happy if it did as well as the S5's battery (but I expected better, not worse).

 

[mitul_mehta]

That's way too less. I get 6 to 7 hours of SOT.. Have the Exynos version..

 

[monicakm]

Well thanks but that tells me nothing. I already knew it wasn't enough hours on my battery, that's why I'm asking for help.

 

[anon(19759)]

What is your brightness on? This is definitely not close to what I'm getting.....

 

[monicakm]

It varies. Sometimes 100% sometimes 50%. I try to keep it at 50% unless I'm outside or looking at photos I've taken but then I sometimes forget to bump it back down to 50%. Still, this is nothing different from my S5

 

[lafountain]

Do you have the Always on Display turned on or off? I know some are reporting a drastic difference, for the better when it is turned off.

 

[monicakm]

I don't use AOD. It's turned off.

 

[hylex]

Humblest of suggestions. I had a similar use case with mine. Massive battery bleedout

I simply did the following

1) Reset the phone

2) Installed my apps only as i needed them.

Took facebook and blocked it from accessing anything via permission manager

4) Switched to a dark theme ( via the theme store)

Only 4 basic points and this seems to have fixed my issues. Roughly right now i am doing 3 hours of whatsapping, 1 hour of voip calling via the same client, lots and lots of reddit/twitter via fenix/default app/ reddit pro, instagram, facebook, telegram and sometimes actual calls. Phone goes 28-34 hours and around 7.5 hours SOT.

PS Forgot to mention. I try and use Wi-Fi wherever possible (parents place/my own/office). While using LTE is not that bad, that 7.5 hours directly drops to 5.5 hours with it entirely. If i am in a bad signal zone for a longish period of time, i drop it to 3G. Stuff still keeps coming and battery lasts longer

 

[monicakm]

OK hylex, let me see if I can take this one step at a time and thank you for your response.
1...reset the phone. As in a factory reset or turning the phone off? I've restarted the phone several times as well as deleted cache partition (many times).
2...install apps only as you need them? So you're uninstalling and reinstalling the same apps a few times a day? Uninstall Weatherbug and then reinstall it when I need it? Don't think I'm willing to do that.
3...I don't do Facebook and it's not installed.
4...I haven't added any extra/different themes and I use a photo (that Iv'e taken with the phone) as my wallpaper. Just using the phone as it came out of the box and that includes TouchWiz. Same with my S5.

whatsapping, 1 hour of voip calling via the same client, lots and lots of reddit/twitter via fenix/default app/ reddit pro...I don't know what any of that is <lol>, well I know what Twitter is but I don't use it and as for Instagram, I don't have the app, I just have a link to my daughter's page.

One thing that is different with my usage between the two phones is I'm now primarily using LTE (my signal strength is usually 2 bars) because it's way faster than my Wifi and my wifi is capped at 10GB/month (HughesNet Satellite Internet) with a max speed of 10MB download...and that's on a good day! I have a 6GB plan with Verizon so I save my wifi for my home computer and non LTE tablet. On the S5, my Verizon data plan was smaller so I connected more with wifi. Could this be the big culprit?

Do you keep locations/gps and bt enabled? Is syncing on between devices?

 

[lafountain]

Has it been giving you this battery life issue since you got the device or is this something new?

I have only had my S7 for 2 days but where my S5 would have been at 15-30% when I left work, my S7 has yet to be under 60% when I leave work for the day.

Me personally, when I get a new phone, first thing I do when I get home with it is do a factory reset. It is just something I have always done with computers, so it kind of just carried over to phones. Once it was done booting up and setting up, I uninstalled/disabled any app that I knew I wouldn't use, then started installing my apps.

 

[monicakm]

It's never been as good as the S5 from day one... I did do a factory reset when I bought the phone. I'm running the latest version of marshmallow.
Today... 8.5 hours on battery,2 hours on screen time, 15%

 

[Michael Saxon]

Something else that will drain battery like crazy is a weak cell signal...even when on WiFi. Understood your s5 didn't have this problem but it worth checking out. Put your phone in airplane mode and turn on WiFi and Bluetooth. If your battery is a little better, that is not the problem. If it's wildly better (like double) you may have found your culprit.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[lafountain]

Well I am at a loss, definitely doesn't sound right that your S5 had better battery life than your S7. Possibly a defective battery.

Could try installing GSAM to see if it shows any additional detail on what is draining the battery.

 

[monicakm]

Something else that will drain battery like crazy is a weak cell signal...even when on WiFi. Understood your s5 didn't have this problem but it worth checking out. Put your phone in airplane mode and turn on WiFi and Bluetooth. If your battery is a little better, that is not the problem. If it's wildly better (like double) you may have found your culprit.

Posted via the Android Central App

OK, tomorrow when I get up, I'll put the phone in Airplane mode and enable Wifi (BT is always on). So if I get crazy good battery life, it's my data connection? I hope that's not the issue. I'll just have to put up with recharging the phone thru out the day. Something is up with my HughesNet satellite data too For YEARS I've used roughly 6 to 8 of my 10GB/monthly allowance. Never had to be careful or worry about going over. The last year, I've either gone over or had to watch my usage very closely. A Hughesnet ts agent found that I was using 15-17mb/hr even with the computer off or on but no one using it...15-17mb and hour during the night or while we were gone. No one near enough to be using my signal. As a test, I was told to unplug the HughesNet modem to see if any data was used. It wasn't. Until I feel like tracking down the culprit, I'm having to unplug the modem during the night or long periods of inactivity. This last month was my first month of unplugging the modem. I was back to my normal 6-8GB. If I had to use wifi for my phone's connection, I'd have to leave wifi connected all the time. The joys of living in rural America...satellite internet and sketchy cell reception!

 

[anon(749368)]

It sounds as if the signal is the culprit. Two bars is pretty low so the phone works hard to stay connected. Alternatively, you could do a cache wipe : power off the phone and then press simultaneously power, volume up and home buttons. Once the screen powers on, release the power button bit keep the other two pressed untill you see the little Android robot on the screen. Once in recovery mode, select "clear cache" by using down volume button and press power button once to activate cache clear. After its done clearing cache (should take only a few moments, not longer), select reboot and it'll restart your phone. I had some battery drain issues and clearing cache and uninstalling the two apps I suspected of being aggressive, it fixed the problem.

Hope it works for you.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[manomic]

Here are a few things that I think may help,

1) Turn off NFC if that's on.
2) Remove Android Device manager if that's installed, it caused a lot of CPU wake locks using Maps.
3) Try setting GPS positioning to use only GPS instead of GPS+WIFI & Mobile Networks.
4) Turn off google now cards and location history.
5) Set app power saving to always for apps those you don't use often or those you don't need notifications from.
6) Turn off background data for apps you feel don't need background data. I disabled background data for store but that causes downloads to stop when the app is not in foreground / screen is off, sometimes doesn't open stating background data is needed.

Your screen power consumption is high, could be because your screen is mostly from 50-100 % bright. I have an S7E but my screen power usage is 150mah lesser for the same time period that you have it on though its a bigger screen. I set the screen to have automatic brightness so its not at 100% more than 20 mins a day. At the end of the day with 3 hours of screen time I end up with 55-60% battery.

A lot many apps use GPS so when you have it turned on they may try to use GPS in the background, if you cant turn off GPS, remove the GPS permission for apps that you feel don't require GPS access.

From what I can see, your phone's battery chart never has a flat portion where the system goes to standby and battery lost per hour 1% or so. Try these things out, if they don't help, you could try installing Wakelock Detector and see what all apps cause a wake lock (doesn't let the CPU to be in a low freq state for prolonged periods), the only way to fix it would be find those culprit apps with lots of wakelocks and remove them or wait and see if a newer version reduces those wakelocks.

 

[Tadrift]

OK hylex, let me see if I can take this one step at a time and thank you for your response.
1...reset the phone. As in a factory reset or turning the phone off? I've restarted the phone several times as well as deleted cache partition (many times).
2...install apps only as you need them? So you're uninstalling and reinstalling the same apps a few times a day? Uninstall Weatherbug and then reinstall it when I need it? Don't think I'm willing to do that.
3...I don't do Facebook and it's not installed.
4...I haven't added any extra/different themes and I use a photo (that Iv'e taken with the phone) as my wallpaper. Just using the phone as it came out of the box and that includes TouchWiz. Same with my S5.

whatsapping, 1 hour of voip calling via the same client, lots and lots of reddit/twitter via fenix/default app/ reddit pro...I don't know what any of that is <lol>, well I know what Twitter is but I don't use it and as for Instagram, I don't have the app, I just have a link to my daughter's page.

One thing that is different with my usage between the two phones is I'm now primarily using LTE (my signal strength is usually 2 bars) because it's way faster than my Wifi and my wifi is capped at 10GB/month (HughesNet Satellite Internet) with a max speed of 10MB download...and that's on a good day! I have a 6GB plan with Verizon so I save my wifi for my home computer and non LTE tablet. On the S5, my Verizon data plan was smaller so I connected more with wifi. Could this be the big culprit?

Do you keep locations/gps and bt enabled? Is syncing on between devices?

That is some good advise and try it out. I work in the battery industry and I couldn't have said it better.

Signal strength is big one. Poor signals will kill a battery almost faster than anything. Use Wifi as much as possible. Make sure Google Play doesn't update apps unless you are on Wifi. There are a lot variables when it comes to battery life and the best way is to just test and see what helps, process of elimination and to play detective. Some basics include, not running any radios that you don't have too. Meaning, BT, NFC, LTE, GPS, etc. I use Tasker to set up different situations and once home, it toggles all that off. When I leave home and I am on the road it turns off things like WiFi and turns on GPS, LTE Data, higher brightness etc. Again at the office it does the same thing. So I don't even have to think about it.

Some Apps are terrible when it comes to battery drain. Also check how often they are checking for new info. If you only check your email 3-4 times a day, yet the App is checking every 5 minutes, change the settings. Or some just kill the battery for no good reason. So I remove or disable any I don't use. And keep a close eye on the ones I do.

Make sure you phone is in doze. I know it isn't mandatory, but before I go to bed I close all open apps. That is just me. But you should see a period of time in the battery graph when the phone sleeps. If not, find out why.

Yes, screen brightness does matter, but these other things should be checked first. Dark themes helps some. But most of these are just icing on the cake. Do the basics first.

 

[monicakm]

OK guys. I got a little late start today and wanted to make this wifi vs lte showdown as equal as I could.
You'll find each graphic labeled (lte or wifi) and the areas of importance outlined in red.
What do you think? Have we found the culprit?

 

[Rukbat]

Tap the graph to get to the next page - post that screenshot so we can see the signal strength. (Low signal strength can drain a battery fast.)

 

[monicakm]

Are you are talking about tapping the graphic that I included above to enlarge it? can't anyone do that? I enlarge pictures on this forum all the time. Wi-Fi and LTE both have two bars. If you are telling me to go into my phone system and Battery and tap on the graph to get to a different page, that doesn't work for me. Tapping on the battery graph doesn't bring up another page.