Battery draining very fast all of the sudden

[Randomhero180]

Fully charged at 2pm and then to yellow at 730pm. With very very little use. No apps using up batter either.

Any ideas on what could be going on?

 

[anon(394005)]

Bad battery? Was the phone warm at all (possibly from high cpu from a stuck process)? Did it have a good signal? Wasn't struggling to find it?

 

[jf2go]

Had that happen to me today as well. I didn't do anything out of my normal routine. Usually, I am at ~1/2 battery by the time I drive home from work. Today, I was 1/2 battery by noon and powersave (10%) by 4.

 

[antbolt]

Now that you mentioned it, the past week it seems like battery is draining quicker.

 

[soboness5]

Hate to fuel the flames of a conspiracy theory (Just kidding. I love watching those shows about how we never landed on the moon, etc)...but I have the extended battery and it used to last well over a day. Recently it has barely been making it through the day (about 14-16 hours) with the same moderate use.

The only thing i've changed recently besides standard updates, is adding SwiftKey 3 Beta...but i'm not sure if that was when this started.

 

[matt0715]

I just reset my battery stats and the battery life becomes good again

 

[worwig]

I just did 15 hours and the gauge is at 53%. So I might be able to get 30 hours from it (I doubt that though).
So all is normal here.

 

[anon(394005)]

How old are your batteries? Although I rarely use it anymore, my extended battery that I've had for little over a year now, doesn't seem to hold quite as long of a charge the last few times I've used it. I suspect it's due to the fact it was used quite heavily during the NFL season when I would stream games at work. Under those conditions, the battery and phone got warm for extended periods of time. Subsequently that battery went through a lot of heavy discharge/charge cycles.

In comparison, the two one year old standard 1400mAh batteries and two six month old Rezound 1620mAh batteries are still as strong as day one, so those four have had much less charge cycles and much lighter use.

 

[redcat22]

Is it the dialer bug again?

 

[mman609]

My Thunderbolt has been almost trouble free since I got it. I've had none of the litany of problems reported here since it was introduced. But this week has suddenly had a few episodes of rapid battery drain like others are reporting. No new apps, no new changes other than a couple of app updates. Checking battery usages showed the dailer up at the top of the list after only one brief call under 5 minutes. Restarted the phone and all was well. But the same thing reoccurred several times this week. Again the dailer was up at the top of usage. No idea of the reason - but another data point for the discussion.

 

[cadzilla74]

I doubt there's a simple answer that would solve everyone's experience with fast battery drain occasionally because of how we've all personalized our TBolts and the apps we use and how we have them set to run.

I use the free app Watchdog which is great at catching apps occasionally going rogue. A regular perp on this list is Weatherbug which works great most of the time but it occasionally gets pissy when I move from one geographic area to another and it can't locate me properly. It really cranks up the CPU and GPS usage trying to follow me to deliver local weather wherever I am. Watchdog tells me it's acting up and let's me kill it on the spot. Not to mention the Sense weather which tries to do the same thing.

Widgets that deliver sports scores, news, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook etc are polling for updates which, when running normally, don't take a lot of juice until they lose contact with their respective motherships and then they go into constant polling mode trying to reconnect.

Mail programs that are set to poll for new messages can run into the same issue.

Plus you never know how a particular tower is behaving when you hit it or what Verizon may be up to.

Today, for example, I'm at work and noticed my 4G indicator was constantly active. Blinking UP a lot and then both UP and DOWN solid for several seconds. I thought I was getting a "push" from Big Red. Watchdog saw no apps misbehaving. Speedtest reported 6.5mb down and 5.8mb up which is good in the secured building I'm in. Yet I couldn't load a web page. You gotta believe all that 4G activity was sucking juice like crazy and I never could figure out what was causing it. I rebooted and everything went right back to normal. If I hadn't noticed that activity myself I bet my battery would have been dead in no time. I wish, in hindsight, I'd checked which tower I was hitting before and after the reboot since there are quite a few in the immediate area.

And yes, there are always the usual physical suspects, old battery not holding a charge anymore, charger not fully charging, dirty contacts, etc. I know rooted users have access to a much broader suite of diagnostic and monitoring apps but when my stock OS array of health checkers comes up empty I just chalk it up to sunspots, reboot and move on.

YMMV

 

[cadzilla74]

Just a quick addendum to the above post since I mentioned an "array of tools" for checking how the TBolt is doing. Here's a quick list of what I have installed. There are others. I hope folks here can make suggestions of some I'm not aware of but I recommend the following because they have worked perfectly and never misbehaved for a very long time.

All are available from the Play Store. Some are paid, most are free. I will say "pay" where applicable.

Speed Test - speed test
History Eraser - cleans all kinds of old crap not just browser history
EMS - my anti-virus of choice from ESET Security (I got it free when in Beta not sure if it's a pay to play now or not)
MyBackupPro - nuff said. Paid app. Back it up or lose it. Simple concept.
Watchdog - very small footprint in monitor mode or you can crank it up and watch what all your running processes are doing in real time.
GPS Status - not only finds you but also lets you know if you are having a problem getting geo-located
WIFI Analyzer - great for checking your phone's wifi connection but even better for helpin g you set your home router to the right channel to fix all your home network wifi issues
LLama - just because I love it. You can set things to do things at different times in different places which makes the phone greater than it is and can save battery too. Read up on it and then install it and set it up. You'll love it
ASTRO - file manager. Doesn't DO anything but lets you manage your file system to take out the trash among other things.
Network Info II - Gives wifi info on wifi such as IP address and 3g-4g info off wifi such as signal strength
Data Counter - don't really need it since I'm grandfathered on unlimited but always fun to watch the numbers roll up every month on Big Red's dime. If you are on a limited plan, screw MyVerizon app, use this and get real time stats of your bandwidth usage and it has a widget.

OK, let's hear from the Peanut Gallery. What tools can't you live without. Maybe we'll get enough going here to make a "Sticky" out of it.

 

[Sparkyvett]

Same for me, I have not been able to figure out what is draining my battery. It had to be some update to an app or the dialer because I haven't installed anything new in a long time.:'(

My Thunderbolt has been almost trouble free since I got it. I've had none of the litany of problems reported here since it was introduced. But this week has suddenly had a few episodes of rapid battery drain like others are reporting. No new apps, no new changes other than a couple of app updates.

 

[redcat22]

My Thunderbolt has been almost trouble free since I got it. I've had none of the litany of problems reported here since it was introduced. But this week has suddenly had a few episodes of rapid battery drain like others are reporting. No new apps, no new changes other than a couple of app updates. Checking battery usages showed the dailer up at the top of the list after only one brief call under 5 minutes. Restarted the phone and all was well. But the same thing reoccurred several times this week. Again the dailer was up at the top of usage. No idea of the reason - but another data point for the discussion.

Yup that's the dialer bug and unfortunately the only way to stop it (until the next call you make) is to reboot.

 

[Spaceheater]

Yep, a reboot worked for me!

 

[jf2go]

Looks like my battery drain was just an anomaly on Tuesday. Things have been back to normal for the last two days.

 

[gr8lipz]

This has been happening to me all week. Draining about 10% an hour or more. Nothing running. Battery usage shows Idle at about 80% and Cell stby about 14%. I'm rebooting again.

 

[vivid123456]

the same thing started with mine right after doing the ICS update. Only thing i uninstalled was 'GO Launcher'.... Also is there a way to setup phone sleep patterns to save battery?
Yesterday night i had the phone at 90% charge at 11PM and at 6AM today morning it was down to 2% and it was just sitting on my desk with no activity... kinda sucks!! :'(

 

[redcat22]

the same thing started with mine right after doing the ICS update. Only thing i uninstalled was 'GO Launcher'.... Also is there a way to setup phone sleep patterns to save battery?
Yesterday night i had the phone at 90% charge at 11PM and at 6AM today morning it was down to 2% and it was just sitting on my desk with no activity... kinda sucks!! :'(

Putting the phone in airplane mode while you're sleeping may help conserve the battery. I have a land line in my home so that's what i do when i go to bed.

 

[redcat22]

the same thing started with mine right after doing the ICS update. Only thing i uninstalled was 'GO Launcher'.... Also is there a way to setup phone sleep patterns to save battery?
Yesterday night i had the phone at 90% charge at 11PM and at 6AM today morning it was down to 2% and it was just sitting on my desk with no activity... kinda sucks!! :'(

Whoa whoa whoa... did you receive ICS from Verizon?