Wifi Kills Battery Life

[dr_elusive]

I have both a E4GT (personal phone) and a droid Razr (work phone) and the 2 give me very different results using wifi. On the droid the wifi doesnt seem to affect battery life much at all but on my Samsung it simply murders the battery. You can look at the battery graph and see that as soon as you turn on wifi it just nose dives. My wifes E4GT does this too. I run with 4g, and GPS off, blue tooth on. Could there be some setting on both phones that is causing this battery drain? Maybe a setting on my Router? This problem makes using wifi almost impossible because if you forget to turn it back off your phone will be dead in hours. With wifi off it lasts all day.

Any ideas?

 

[Biggnaa20]

I've found this to be the case on a few roms I've used, but didn't report it because I have been using unofficial roms. Any ill activity is on me for using the roms.

I think it has something to do with how the E4GT searches for signal. That said, I don't have much of a solution except to manually disable wifi when it's not in use or use Juice Defender to automatically disable it when you aren't around a hotspot you usually use.

nb

 

[NYGat0r]

Yes it does, when i first got the phone about 2weeks ago i ran wifi for 2days straight at home. HORRIBLE,

i run 3g its smoother better battery life and not as spotty as my own wifi in my house weird.
my WiFi is only good when im literally 10ft from it. ??? walk to my room i cant use it.:-X

 

[oskar1995]

Unfortunately I can't help much as my results have been the complete opposite of the experiences noted in this post. My wifi actually has really good range. When in my drive way outside the house, it picks up fine. In terms of battery life. I leave it on throughout the day and don't see any negative impact on the battery (Badass Battery Monitor shows 0.6%).

 

[Uglyfido]

Sounds like a bad unit or something. My Wi-fi does NOT drain the battery. In fact, I get way more battery life if I'm just using wi-fi. Also, my wi-fi signal strength has never been a n issue. I use it all through my whole house, and even in my driveway. 4G and 3G drain the battery because it's always looking for a signal, whereas, once wi-fi is connected, it doesn't need to continually search. At least, that's how I understand it. Anyway, good luck with your issue, and let us know if you get it resolved.

 

[DEF3NDER]

My wifi is always connected. I get 20+ hours of battery life on a regular basis. I guess these phones are hit or miss.

 

[Gator352]

My wifi is always connected. I get 20+ hours of battery life on a regular basis. I guess these phones are hit or miss.

20+ hours?.....20?? Sooner or later, you'll have to turn the phone ON!.....J/K

No noticable negative impact using wifi on my end. One thing I thinkis cool though, is that this phone uses a dual band wifi modem.

 

[davis.rob]

Yeah, I agree this is definitely not "normal" and not what most people see. First if you haven't already tried it, do a shutdown and battery pull. I've seen cases (on other phones) where one of the radios, like wifi, gets "stuck" and starts just sucking battery. Had to do a real hardware power down (pull the battery) to get it to reset.

Does this happen everywhere, or is it possibly some specific network (like home or work)? If it's only at home, then maybe there is something weird about your router. Really sounds like a defective phone, except for the fact that your wife's seems to also do it.

 

[DEF3NDER]

Haha I'm on it all day actually. Ask my wife she yells at me.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Android Central Forums

 

[dr_elusive]

I will try a battery pull and see if that does it. The wifi Does seem to turn off and on like it supposed to though. I turned on wifi for a few hours at the end of the day yesterday so you can see what i mean. look how the graph takes a nose dive when wifi is on. It seems to affect it more when connected to a wifi AP but just having it on and not connected (like at work where there is no wifi) seems to take its toll as well. I think this started happening since the last update. It was not like this when i got it.

Dr.

 

[JayWill]

Are you testing this on multiple wifi connections, or just one? I've also noticed wifi having an adverse affect on my battery life recently, but I've been running ICS leaks so I chalked it up to unofficial firmware and never had a chance to test it thoroughly.

If I were to guess, there is something about having wifi on in certain circumstances or configurations that is wake locking the phone (keeping it from going into deep sleep, even though the battery report shows the phone as asleep).

 

[Gator352]

Haha I'm on it all day actually. Ask my wife she yells at me.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Android Central Forums

LOL! Mine too!...

When I get a new phone, I test and use the crap out of it for days and she gets T'd off thinking I love my gadgets more than her. I tell her, honey, I don't love them more than you....I love them just as much though...

I then sleep on the couch for a few nights.

 

[duddy23b]

In my case I thought it was Wi-Fi too but in turned to be various apps that were checking for updates and that's were the battery drain came from, not knowing this at first I would cut off Wi-Fi once arriving at work and my battery would last all day. Then I started getting notifications that certain apps were not updateing as usual so I cut Wi-Fi back on jumping jehosaphat app! were the problem. You might have a similiar problem maybe? or maybe not? but mine is now fixed I just disable apps from checking all the time for updates.