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

[jeffreii]

Thought I was going nuts, but reading this, I'm in the plummet club. Not a check which apps are running and lower my screen brightness power savers club, but I had over 80% battery life, ran app killer and killed everything, put phone to sleep, played tennis for two hours, ate dinner, checked my phone three hours later and was down to 34%.

It didn't do this for the first few weeks I had the phone, it just started this last week. I'm trying the restart right now to see if that helps, but all of this talk about turning off GPS or LTE to help save power is spooky. I didn't sign up to buy a crappy phone that if I nurse it and coddle it, maybe I can get it to slightly work for me. It's not like this is the only phone option. For folks who are off warranty or past their 30 days, I get you might have to try to make it work, but I have time left and am getting ready to return the phone.

Sorry you've joined the club. I'm pretty sure my phone was good for the first few weeks also and then this popped up. No clue why but when I exchanged my phone with AT&T it only took 4 days for the plummet to come back.

Anyways, if you're like me and love the phone aside from this issue...and don't want to give up LTE to solve this temporarily...follow my strategy:
1) In the morning when I wake up I reboot my phone before taking it off the charger.
2) After lunch I reboot again.

These steps are usually enough to prevent the plummet from happening.

EDIT: I've also set my battery low alert in Light Flow to 50% (change this based on your usage). Since I rarely go below 50% without the plummet, this gives me a little bit of early warning to catch the plummet, if it ever happens, and reboot before it does too much damage.

 

[eyecon82]

Re: [Help][50% SOLVED] LTE = random heavy battery drain aka "plum

IN RELATION TO GSIFF_DAEMON

do any of you guys have the "increase volume in pocket" setting on in phone-->settings?

also do any of you have motion settings enabled and/or autorotation on?

Seems it has to do with the gyro issue

also are you guys rooted or non-rooted?

 

[T.Barnhart]

Re: [Help][50% SOLVED] LTE = random heavy battery drain aka "plum

My S3 just started doing this the other day. We were out at the range, and the thing was in my pocket (right off the charger) for 4 hours... screen off the whole time. When I checked it again, it was down to 34%. I couldn't believe it. I did wake up the other morning to some kind of Samsung update and that seems to be when my issues started. When I check my battery stats, it says screen time, Android system, cell standby, logcat (dont know where the heck this came from... never installed it and it wasn't there until a few days ago) and sdcard are draining my battery the most. I never keep bluetooth on and sync is turned off. I have tried uninstalling all the apps I never use and using battery monitors to try and help with the issue. Also I cant get the battery stats to reset like they normally do when I plug it in.

 

[dfb8085]

Re: [Help][50% SOLVED] LTE = random heavy battery drain aka "plum

what is causing this. I use my phone for the most part the same every day. Sometimes it goes and goes kinda like the energier bunny. Other days like today take it off charge put in pocket look at it maybe 4 times during the days and after 6am-2pm of being on the battery icon is yellow. I never turn it off and just use it very sparely. Go along a week and then one day it decides for some reason to plummet. What is going on and why can we not figure what is happening in the back ground to cause this. I had to charge it in the car today just to make it home. This is getting very old and no one will even admit there is a problem. Samsung needs to listen up and try to figure this crap out or its on to another phone for me. can't even make it through the day

 

[KreepyKen]

As Rickoxo says, you'll notice that when you get the plummet, that "Android System" is the main drain. If you install GSam Battery Monitor, it labels it as "Kernel." So it's something that triggers a glitch in the kernel, making it spin up and out of control. Only a reboot seems to stop it.

I'm really hoping that this is fixed in the Jelly Bean update. We should be getting a brand new kernel with that update, and hopefully whatever code in it is going crazy gets replaced or gets noticed in the quality checks.

 

[Dubg]

I was having the same problem with my phone. I took the drastic step of a hard reset. I haven't had it happen again in the past two weeks. Hated having to take the time to re-setup my phone, but it was with it in the long run to get great battery life again.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Tapatalk 2

 

[eyecon82]

I was having the same problem with my phone. I took the drastic step of a hard reset. I haven't had it happen again in the past two weeks. Hated having to take the time to re-setup my phone, but it was with it in the long run to get great battery life again.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Tapatalk 2

Are you rooted?

 

[Dubg]

No. I haven't rooted this phone yet. I did my Motorola Atrix, but I haven't taken the time to do it yet. Basically I'm waiting for the stock Jelly Bean update. If I'm not happy with it, then I'll root and start flashing roms. But so far I've been happy with the GS3.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Axela_23]

So, I think I found the issue.

One person brought up the Google Play store, and how updates seem to happen post rebooting after identifying the battery drain issue.

What I think is happening is that the google play store updates are hanging when trying to update over the cell network. I noticed one time I manually tried to update an app while on the network and it just hung, but it kept running. Not only that, but there wasn't a single notification identifying it, so it would go unnoticed.

So what I did was limit the Google Play updates to Wi-Fi only, and I haven't seen the issue since. It's only been a few days, but I've received Play store updates overnight without battery drain, and I have had the best battery life yet on this phone.

See if this works for others. Perhaps someone else mentioned this potential fix earlier, but I didn't see it. Anyway, it can't hurt.

 

[KreepyKen]

So, I think I found the issue.

One person brought up the Google Play store, and how updates seem to happen post rebooting after identifying the battery drain issue.

What I think is happening is that the google play store updates are hanging when trying to update over the cell network. I noticed one time I manually tried to update an app while on the network and it just hung, but it kept running. Not only that, but there wasn't a single notification identifying it, so it would go unnoticed.

So what I did was limit the Google Play updates to Wi-Fi only, and I haven't seen the issue since. It's only been a few days, but I've received Play store updates overnight without battery drain, and I have had the best battery life yet on this phone.

See if this works for others. Perhaps someone else mentioned this potential fix earlier, but I didn't see it. Anyway, it can't hurt.

Hmmmm....Very interesting. I didn't suspect this because the plummet only happens when I am on wifi at work...so it shouldn't even be touching the cell network. But if there is a glitch in the kernel, maybe it's confused and trying to update something over the cell network, which it can't access because wifi is on, making the kernel bug out. That setting was not checked for me. I checked it and I'll report back here wether or not it works. Good suggestion.

 

[OpenTrackRacer]

I'm still having this issue (on Verizon). It happened twice yesterday, once before I forced Google Play to only update on WiFi and once after. So, unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the problem.

This issue is getting very tiresome. One can only hope that Jelly Bean solves the problem.

 

[daymz]

I am yet another SGS3 owner who has that radio drain/plummet. Exactly like the OP described, I could have written it word-by-word, with the same screenshots of the battery meter. I run the I747 version (LTE on Bell Canada) on ICS 4.0.4.

I am hoping that our carriers will release JB very soon, *with* an updated radio firmware. Otherwise, I may just have to program Tasker to reboot my phone every morning at 9:00am (sigh).

 

[cr105]

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!

 

[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!

 

[cr105]

I read about this fix on another site and it worked for me. I hope everyone has luck with whatever they try.

 

[ilifecomputer]

Keep us posted guys. If the 920 comes out before this is fixed I am jumping ship for a bit.

 

[pinkytime]

I keep screen rotation off pretty much all the time (with very rare exceptions) and I have been seeing this bug even with rotation off, so I do not think it is screen rotation.

(Thanks for the thread... finally found it after poring through a frillion threads about how to conserve battery and install crap to help you do so. I've been seeing this for a while now and the only thing that can stop the sudden battery drain is a reboot. Which sucks because half the time by the time I know it's happening it's too late and I can't really stop everything to recharge. I was thinking it was something in the firmware or some race condition somewhere but I haven't been able to figure out what it is. Guess I should just start rebooting a lot more....)

 

[eyecon82]

Crapppp

Jellybean didn?t solve it. Gsiff_daemon just popped up for me. Just renamed it AGAIN.

Hopefully it won't pop up again

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Android Central Forums

 

[hulimari]

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

 

[SenseMonkey]

I had a white s3 and never had that mysterious plummet you guys are talking about. Mine always got 16+ hrs.

Sent from my awesome HTC one x