Lumia 950 Screen-Off Battery Drain

[treeflip7]

I want to get a discussion going to try to figure out what's causing the massive screen-off battery drain on the lumia 950 (AT&T). I don't believe I'm the only one experiencing this, but here's some background:

Phone has windows hello turned off, hey cortana on, glance screen set to turn off at 15 min. Quiet hours in effect 10pm-8am. Location, cell, wifi, bluetooth all on.

The results:

Charge to 100% and let sit overnight -- first night, around 7 hrs long, it drained to 87%.

Charge to 100% and let sit overnight -- second night, around 9 hours long, it drained to 67%.

Charge to 100% and let sit overnight -- third night, around 7 hours long, it drained to 90%.

Anyone else having similar issues? What's the problem here? My app background permissions have been tinkered with when i first got the phone so a few apps don't run in the background, and I deleted many of the bloat/AT&T apps that I don't use. Thoughts? Solutions?

 

[dfaris]

I would go stop any app that does not need to run in the background from running in the background. I also turned off hey cortana and the lock screen option for cortana. I also stopped edge from running in the background. I would also turn off the advertising id who the heck knows what that thing is doing in the background.

I did this and went to sleep. My battery only drained about 4% over 9 hours.

Edit: I forgot to say. Also make sure you actually close apps. The back arrow does not close apps anymore so you have to hold the back arrow untill the app cards show up and close them that way.

 

[Mark P Andrews]

Edge doesn't show up on my list of Background Apps but it's showing as using 20% of my battery for the last 24 hours. Holding down the arrow shows that nothing is running but my battery has gone from 100% to 50% is 3 hours and phone is hot to the tough. Any thoughts?

 

[Travis Flenker]

Have you installed the latest OS update and turned off Edge prefetch?

Right before the update my phone got pretty hot and started to drain really quickly. Since then it's been way better.

 

[hirsti99]

Hi,
I had the same drain it was dreadful, worse even than win 10 on the lumia 1020.
I disabled the hey cortana option and now its at 86% after normal usage after 9 hours.
I also turned off the retinal scanning as well as I just don't use it, far easier to just enter a pin.
Also make sure the camera module is set to not run in background as that seems to eat the battery.

 

[Nopea]

For me the battery drain is not bad but i always put flight mode on to nights. Backrounds from Edge, Facebook and store are off (L950)

 

[robert peake]

how did you disable the hey cortana option, my phone has been on since 7am today and really havent used it that hard, bit of facebook (posted a couple of pics), browsing email etc but not alot and played some music via bluetooth speaker for 30mins and at 9pm its at 15% which is a worry, i was hoping for more and would understand if i was playing games or something heavy.

 

[merooster]

Last week everything was good normal drain on battery. This week charge was 100%, listened to 45 minutes of music on blue tooth drained to 45% charge. soft reset done a couple of times, pulled battery. still drains fast, turned off almost things. What else is new, can not update my phone or apps. I have 17 in queue.

 

[Tim Maggi]

This is where I'm at. My phone has been fine until Friday. Friday came and now my battery lasts about 4-5 hours. I have just about every single app closed and not running in the background except messaging and phone. Im really frustrated. Also, I cant update anything, just sits there as "pending". Can we not disable skype from messaging!? I dont use Skype and dont want it in my messaging. quite annoying.

 

[duncan0622]

I wonder if the GPS is working all the time to drain the battery? Everytime i unlock my phone, I can see "location" icon is popping up.

 

[dashrendar]

I don't think the Location icon necessarily means GPS. It could also mean WiFi or Mobile Data, because weather apps for example don't need accurate location for temperature or forecast reporting.

Do you have a weather app running either on the lock screen or a Live Tile? Maybe that's what's causing the Location icon to pop up.

I see it pop up on my Lumia 635 every time I unlock the phone but I don't have a battery drain

 

[MrWakett]

Im a bit frustrated too.. got a new lumia 950 and had a few complete charge sessions now after letting the battery run out completely.

Now when I leave the house with 100% and only use the phone for about 2 minutes to check whatsapp, the battery dropped down to 75% after those 2 minutes and another 20 minutes standby / screen off. I turned off Wifi, Bluetooth, did not allow a single App to be active in the background and have no idea whats happening, it must be a joke if the phone really only has about 2-3 hours of battery life...

Hope MS will do some fixing here with software updates.

 

[HSolo]

One thing that I found was with Edge browser: Even though Edge did not show as "open" (long press on "back" button to show open apps, Edge does not show as running), if I opened Edge, then clicked on the "Tabs" button (bottom left), it showed a bunch of pages (tabs) loaded which had moving graphics in them which seem to have affected my battery life. After closing all these page tabs, battery life seemed better.

 

[MStone2]

I have exact same problem. The battery lasted most of the day since I got it. Most settings are stock. Then around December 13th this enormous battery drain problem began and now it only lasts about 4-5 hours and takes much longer to charge. I do remember some apps getting updated either on that day or relatively close to that day. I remember the Gadgets app updated for sure.

 

[YKinase]

WhatsApp was chewing through my battery. I tried Telegram and it does the same thing. Both apps drain the battery at almost 1%/minute while open. Background use is reported as negligible. I had the same problem on my 1020 but it makes these apps painful to use.

I can no longer find a way to restrict background use for Edge. It showed up before my hard reset/update to 0.29, but now there's no option. Background use is around 1.2% anyway, but who knows if that's right.

 

[S00Z]

So I had exact same problems others reporting, storage error message despite having 20gb free, apps not downloading just pending. But worst thing was "hand warmer" as a phone with only 2hrs battery life!!!! With all background battery tasks turned off & every other battery saving idea out there. After printing out return slip for my Nokia 950 I tried one last hard reset, working perfectly now, used heavily all day, hasn't been warm at all and still over 50% of battery life. Hope this continues and works for others.

 

[banker1985]

My mom is having problems with the store. Apps will not download. It is the source of her drain. Tried 1 download for an hour 15 and it drained 40%. If she turns off auto update and doesn't let them install, it works just fine. Tries to download one, it gets stuck. any suggestions?

 

[Muckypup]

I've had these problems since the .29 update. I did a hard reset, restoring afterwards robbed me of several hours of my life, then the error message reappeared along with massive battery drain. I hadn't seen some of these suggestions about apps running in the background and am now in the process of returning the phone - it's SIM free. I use WhatsApp and many other location related apps and think it ridiculous to have to close apps after using them, presumably notifications won't push through which negates the purpose of a smartphone. It's even more absurd to have to close apps that you don't want in the first place. Microsoft need to sort this immediately.

 

[SuperSamuli]

Problem is most likely .29 update and Messaging + Skype app running in the background that is draining the battery in only 4-5 hours. Only solution right now is not to allow Messaging + Skype to run in background - which means that you need to manual check for incoming messages / texts.

 

[Gunbear]

My Lumia 950 also used a lot of battery eventhough it was not in use. Yesterday i switched off "Sync SMS-Messages" and now my Lumia drain only 11% in 12 hours. I hope Microsoft will fix this problem in the next update. Messaging + Skype is still running in background on my phone, so it looks like it is the syncing to OneDrive that drains battery :angel: