How can I tell if I'm having battery issues?

[Lundon44]

So I've been reading about a lot of people finding the battery on the 1520 to be amazing. So far, based on my first 3 full days of use it's been little to no better than my 920. I don't know if I have a lemon or if I'm considered a power user and my battery lasting as long as it does is typical from my usage.

Yesterday it sat on the charger at work all day. I pulled it off at 7pm at full charge. I made my 20 min walk home. Answered one 3 min phone call. Got home and I was already in the 87% battery remaining range after being off the charger for just over an hour. I did a morefew things on it, like surf the net, took a few pics then uploaded them on Fhotoroom and I was down to 84%. I put the phone down for another hour or so then did a bit more surfing for about 15 min then tossed on Minion Rush for about 30-40 min and then Modern Combat 4 for about 30 more min.

Checked my battery and I was down to 35%. So that hour or so of gaming cost me about 40% battery.

To me this was typical on my 920. But after reading about people gaming on MC4 for 1 straight hour with only 20% battery drain or going 3 days before a charge I'm trying to figure out what my issue might be.

Mind you, I've only had the phone a couple days. The 2nd day I did a full discharge and then a full charge just incase.

My phone settings are:
- Full Screen brightness at max 24/7, auto brightness disabled
- Wi-fi always on but only connected when I'm at home
- Location Services on 24/7
- 1 email account with "sync as items arrive"
- 1 email account with "sync every hour"
- Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts connected
- bluetooth turned off
- tap + send turned off
- Highest connection speed in cellular settings set to 4G aka LTE
- Battery saver on
- back up to the cloud on
- Skydrive photos upload set to Good Quality over data and video set to Good Quality over Wi-fi
- Both options in Find My Phone are on
- Glance Beta installed and set to "peek"

Live tiles:
- Amazing Weather HD set to hourly updates
- Me tile
- Facebook
- Fhotoroom
- Fuse tile (rss feeds)
- das Image
- Metrotube
- Flixster
- Break.com
- Speedtest.net
- My Stocks Portfolio
- Asphalt 8, Dark Knight, Minion Rush, Six-Guns, Modern Combat 4

Background Tasks that are "allowed":
- Amazing Weather HD
- Battery
- das Image
- Fuse
- MetroTube
- Minion Rush
- My Stocks Portfolio
- Twitter
- Viber
- WhatsApp

Sorry for the long winded post but if anyone has any suggestions based on my setup that will save me some serious juice please let me know. I was wondering if keeping Wi-Fi enabled all day regardless of using it might be one problem. Or maybe I just need to give the battery time to settle. Not sure..

 

[TenTwelve]

I'd say with your settings and background tasks it might be expected. Then again, I have my 1520 set up just like my 920 and the battery life between the 2 is night and day.

 

[Alienhead95]

Since the 1520 has a bigger battery, you should definitely get some extra backup with the same usage pattern compared to the 920.
Based on my experience, whenever I kept the wifi switched off, i got real good battery life. I did that experiment once, now i keep the wifi off every time and switch it on only when needed. This experiment was on my 920.
I just got my 1020 last night. will see how it performs.
Also, you can try some slow and painful experiments. Install one app at a time and observe battery life. By doing that you will make sure, that you don’t have a hog on your gorgeous phone(jealous).

 

[pankaj981]

Full screen brightness is a sure battery killer

 

[Lundon44]

Thanks everyone. I might try turning off wi-fi to start and if it doesn't help much maybe I'll downgrade the screen to auto-brightness. It's not like I'm concerned with charging my phone every day because I'm used to that already with my previous phone but when I'm seeing other brag about going 3 days without a charge or gaming for 3 hours and only losing 60% I'm a bit jealous. So I want to make sure that the battery life I'm getting is what I should expect based on my settings.

Should I disable all background tasks? What does this even do? Does it disable the live tiles or the ability to hold the back button and fast resume the app?

But if anyone else notices anything that I should disable to substantially increase battery life I'm open to suggestions!

 

[Lundon44]

Btw, I just installed some battery app that keep tabs on all the discharge rates for various things. I stepped out for a 1 hour break and opened the app and found it at 96% without any use. I was at 100% when I took my break as well. The app also says my discharge rate was 7.99% per hour. Doesn't sound good for a phone in sleep mode. Though my battery was at 96% not 92%.

 

[jbowyer1]

So far, based on my first 3 full days of use it's been little to no better than my 920. I don't know if I have a lemon or if I'm considered a power user and my battery lasting as long as it does is typical from my usage.

Thank you for posting this! I'm in the same boat as you, and have been wondering if I'm crazy. I switched from a 920 to the 1520 (international RM-937) a week ago, and on the first day I duplicated my 920's configuration on it exactly -- same apps, accounts, configuration, background tasks, etc. My configuration is eerily similar to yours, with the only difference being that I leave the glance screen set to always on (which surprisingly made less than a 10% daily difference on my 920.)

For the first two days, my 1520 only got 12 hours of battery life each day, and that was with my regular, everyday usage, without any gaming, video watching, tethering, nav, or anything else battery-intensive. I then tried a day with automatic brightness, sunlight readability off, the glance screen off, and email accounts set to only poll hourly, and it made no difference to the abysmal battery life.

Since then, I've tried removing chunks of background task-capable apps, thinking it's a buggy app molesting my battery or cpu for some reason. Yesterday I thought I had nabbed it -- the phone did great all day; the Battery Sense app had it at around -3% battery rate per hour all day, and the battery was at 50% at 10pm, 16 hours off the charger! I then charged it on my 920's qi charging pad overnight (neener, America!) and today, with the same configuration as yesterday, it's been sucking between -9-12% all day long, with no apps running and almost no usage by me. I got fed up with it around noon, uninstalled every single app and game on the phone except Battery Sense, rebooted it, and it continued its battery sucking all the same -- wtf, right?

I had to put it on a charger around 3:30, just so it wouldn't die on my commute home, but I've attached the Battery Sense graph showing yesterday and today's differences. I think I'm going to take it back to the store and exchange it tomorrow, in case it's a bad battery or cpu or cog or sprocket or something. Oh, and if it matters, it's been the same with both the 10517 and 10521 OS builds (developer preview program,) and all of the Nokia apps are up-to-date.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them! This phone has been nothing but frustration for me so far, and makes me miss my 920 (The 920 went to the gf, and I'd have better luck prying a gun from zombie Charlton Heston's hands than getting it back from her...)

 

[Jf.Vigor]

Thank you for posting this! I'm in the same boat as you, and have been wondering if I'm crazy. I switched from a 920 to the 1520 (international RM-937) a week ago, and on the first day I duplicated my 920's configuration on it exactly -- same apps, accounts, configuration, background tasks, etc. My configuration is eerily similar to yours, with the only difference being that I leave the glance screen set to always on (which surprisingly made less than a 10% daily difference on my 920.)

For the first two days, my 1520 only got 12 hours of battery life each day, and that was with my regular, everyday usage, without any gaming, video watching, tethering, nav, or anything else battery-intensive. I then tried a day with automatic brightness, sunlight readability off, the glance screen off, and email accounts set to only poll hourly, and it made no difference to the abysmal battery life.

Since then, I've tried removing chunks of background task-capable apps, thinking it's a buggy app molesting my battery or cpu for some reason. Yesterday I thought I had nabbed it -- the phone did great all day; the Battery Sense app had it at around -3% battery rate per hour all day, and the battery was at 50% at 10pm, 16 hours off the charger! I then charged it on my 920's qi charging pad overnight (neener, America!) and today, with the same configuration as yesterday, it's been sucking between -9-12% all day long, with no apps running and almost no usage by me. I got fed up with it around noon, uninstalled every single app and game on the phone except Battery Sense, rebooted it, and it continued its battery sucking all the same -- wtf, right?

I had to put it on a charger around 3:30, just so it wouldn't die on my commute home, but I've attached the Battery Sense graph showing yesterday and today's differences. I think I'm going to take it back to the store and exchange it tomorrow, in case it's a bad battery or cpu or cog or sprocket or something. Oh, and if it matters, it's been the same with both the 10517 and 10521 OS builds (developer preview program,) and all of the Nokia apps are up-to-date.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them! This phone has been nothing but frustration for me so far, and makes me miss my 920 (The 920 went to the gf, and I'd have better luck prying a gun from zombie Charlton Heston's hands than getting it back from her...)

In what other ways has the phone been frustrating? surely it can't just be the battery life.

 

[rajamass]

Turning on Wi-Fi drastically reduces battery life, turn it on only when it is connected

The reason is the phone continuously searches for available connections in the background, this is same with network tooo

Never turn on network if it is unavailable in some remote place, the phone searches for signal all the time and consumes more battery

 

[Lundon44]

I seem to have gotten some improvements since my original posting. I went through my settings and made some changes. However, these are changes that I never had to make on my 920.

I disabled the following and it has shown some improvements based on my settings from my first posting:

- disabled Wi-Fi (only turned on when I'm at home with accessible wi-fi)
- set both email accounts to sync every 15 min instead of as items arrive
- turned off app and settings back up (can do this manually any time anyway)
- set photos and videos to sync to Skydrive on Wi-fi only
- find my phone periodic location saving turned off
- reduced background tasks to:
- Amazing Weather HD
- Battery
- das Image
- Pheed
- MetroTube
- My Stocks Portfolio
- WhatsApp

 

[Lundon44]

So I made a breakthrough...

Last night I went to see The Hobbit and with my phone in my pocket not being touched I dropped 14%! Last night I went to bed with my battery at 62%. I accidentally left my phone off the charger. I woke up this morning pissed expecting my battery to be on battery saver but through some miracle of God it did NOT move a single percentage. Don't ask me how this was possible but the only way I can make sense of it was that I was connected to Wi-fi at home. I only received one email over night and a couple live tiles updated. This led me to immediately believe that the reason I'm not seeing stellar battery life (though it is still very good) is because of LTE.

So I did a second test. Normally on my short trek to work or home from work I drop about 7% just on my 20-30 min walk without use. This baffles me. Today I manually dropped the connection down from max speed of 4G aka LTE to 3G. I made my trip to work this morning, took it out of my pocket to check the battery and guess what? It did not move a single percent! So in conclusion, my battery eating culprit is LTE.

Now.. I'm not sure if this is only going to cause Canadians who purchased unlocked 1520's issues because Rogers actually operates on the 2600mhz LTE Max band which supposedly can deliver us "speeds of up to 150mbps". So it seems like this LTE band is causing some battery drain. Sadly, the only solution is to manually adjust my data connection speeds based on use but that's pretty annoying. And I doubt a fix for this is going to address this issue. That's too bad.

 

[jbowyer1]

In what other ways has the phone been frustrating? surely it can't just be the battery life.

10 to 12 hours of battery life isn't enough in and of itself to make a phone frustrating to use? I didn't feel confident the phone would make it through a work day and commutes, much less get through the evening if I went out after work; as someone with a 45 minute walk home from work with music as my lone company, that's not a pleasant feeling to have about one's phone.

However, while I do feel the battery issue was bad enough to make the phone frustrating to deal with and borderline unusable as a daily driver, you're right -- there is another issue that's frustrating me, and that's the touchscreen problem with swipes or long-presses registering as taps. It's quite annoying launching an app in error from the home screen, especially when showing off the phone to someone; even more so, it's worse when you're showing off the phone to a coworker, go into the Games hub, try to scroll through the games list, and accidentally launch a game with a long start-up. Such a trivial and embarrassing problem, one that shouldn't exist in 2013 on a smartphone, and not exactly selling the phone and WP to a GS4-using coworker. I can't fathom how this phone made it through Nokia QA with a problem so obvious, which had me grumbling in my first hour with the phone.

Beyond that, my only other gripe with the phone is the loose sim tray. Oh, and I wish the buttons protruded a bit more, like on the 920, but that's no biggie. And if you're expecting me to gripe about its size, not going to happen! Daniel said it best in his review addendum: The point is, size is all relative. Once you start using a 6 inch phone, after a while it stops feeling too big and everything else feels just too small. I couldn't agree more with this statement; helping my gf with my old 920, it now feels so small, which is ironic because she's loving the "huge screen," coming from an iPhone 4S with its silly 3.5" screen.

NOW... back to the issue at-hand, battery life. I exchanged my 10-12 hour battery life 1520 at Harvey Norman (Australian retailer,) whose manager put up an ignorant fight over it, stating that it's just the way the WP OS is and what I should expect, but eventually succumbed to my informed WP ****** furor, and have now had my second 1520 for a full week. I configured the new one exactly like my first one and my old 920, even adding the Nokia Motion Monitor beta app and Battery Sense, with both running as background tasks, and the new one has had an estimated 48-58 hours every day since I got it!

My first one MUST have had some kind of battery or chip defect (causing it to eat up battery,) as it was using over 9% battery per hour with only the Battery Sense app installed, no other apps or games on the phone, and after a fresh reboot. This new one's battery life is positively AMAZING, like everyone posts about here on the forums, tackling tethering, gaming, and video watching with aplomb. I want this new 1520 to have my babies.

And for what it's worth, four of the seven days have had their entirety spent at my gf's house, who doesn't have wi-fi, using only LTE on Telstra. No perceptible battery difference with being all-LTE versus on wi-fi for me, sorry, Lundon!

Two days were spent with automatic brightness off and high brightness on, before switching to automatic; the 6" of high brightness was just too bright for me in a dark room, like when lying in bed. No significant battery difference with either setting, at least in the sense that I've never seen less than 48 hours estimated. Otherwise, I have wi-fi and location stuff on, glance screen set to Always On, Bluetooth occasionally on to use with my Jaybird ear buds, and with nine apps enabled for background tasks (one being the new Nokia Motion Monitor beta, as I mentioned.)

Granted, both 1520s have had the same loose sim card trays and iffy touchscreens, but those problems are trivial compared to the battery issue I was having. I'm hoping the Nokia firmware update fixes the touchscreen issue, if us international RM-937 people ever get it.

Overall, though, now that my battery life is proper, I LOVE this phone! There's no going back to a "small" 4.5-5" phone for me!

 

[Lundon44]

Interesting.. With all my original options back on (except I've set 3G to my highest connection) I only see 20 hours and 16 min remaining at 100% battery. My discharge rate is 4.93% an hour according to my battery app. Curious if there's something more than my weak LTE signal causing battery drain. Mind you I've only done one FULL discharge of my battery since having my 1520. So I don't know if that helps at all.

 

[Lundon44]

Two
days were spent with automatic brightness off and high brightness on, before switching to automatic; the 6" of high brightness was just too bright for me in a dark room, like when lying in bed. No significant battery difference with either setting, at least in the sense that I've never seen less than 48 hours estimated. Otherwise, I have wi-fi and location stuff on, glance screen set to Always On, Bluetooth occasionally on to use with my Jaybird ear buds, and with nine apps enabled for background tasks (one being the new Nokia Motion Monitor beta, as I mentioned.)

Granted, both 1520s have had the same loose sim card trays and iffy touchscreens, but those problems are trivial compared to the battery issue I was having. I'm hoping the Nokia firmware update fixes the touchscreen issue, if us international RM-937 people ever get it.

Overall, though, now that my battery life is proper, I LOVE this phone! There's no going back to a "small" 4.5-5" phone for me!

In comparison to my original post, is there major difference in our settings? Trying to determine what my issue is. I think the best I've seen so far far was 24hrs of battery remaining. I'm sure throwing my phone into airplane mode might improve that time which could tell me if my data connection is the sole issue.

 

[jbowyer1]

In comparison to my original post, is there major difference in our settings?

As I mentioned in my other post, our configurations are very similar. Copying your format, mine is:

- Automatic brightness (though fixed High brightness was tested, as mentioned)
- Wi-Fi always on, but only connected when I'm at home
- Location Services on 24/7
- 1 ActiveSync email account (with email / contacts / calendar) with sync 'as items arrive' and email from 'any time'
- 1 IMAP4 email account with sync 'every 15 minutes' and email from 'any time'
- Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a Nokia account connected
- Bluetooth turned off, but on as-needed for ear buds (twice a day on work days for 45 minutes each time)
- tap + send turned off
- Highest connection speed in cellular settings set to 4G aka LTE
- Battery Saver on
- back up to the cloud on
- Skydrive photos upload set to Good Quality over data and video set to Good Quality over Wi-Fi (this originally, but I recently changed it to best quality over Wi-Fi for both)
- Both options in Find My Phone are on
- Glance Background beta installed and set to Always On, with night mode going from 9pm to 6am
- Double tap to wake on
- Feedback disabled, because I want the rest of you to suffer with my same misery (lol, I kid... possibly)

Background Tasks that are explicitly Allowed:

- Amazing Weather HD (hourly updates on my GPS location, and also doing lock screen duty)
- Call Credit
- Flashlite Pro (to show battery life on its pinned tile)
- My Stocks Portfolio+
- Nokia Motion Monitor beta
- Simple Calendar
- TVShow
- WhatsApp

10 apps are explicitly Blocked, and Advanced shows 25 non-modifiable apps.

I'm sure throwing my phone into airplane mode might improve that time which could tell me if my data connection is the sole issue.

Personally, I doubt it'd be the OS affecting battery life, aside from setting the display brightness. WP has proven itself to play quite nicely with batteries from my experience with five WP phones now, always tailoring my OS settings to be more feature-intensive, with little regard to battery or human life.

I would suspect it to be apps using up the battery, as I've encountered a couple of them that had problems causing them to cycle continuously in the background and decimate a battery. Specifically, I remember one that didn't handle the small tile addition in WP 7.8 properly, causing it to go haywire and endlessly cycle trying to download a non-existent image for its small tile, killing a full battery in a few hours. This is why I suspected my previous 1520 had a hardware issue, since it was using 9%+ battery rate per hour with no apps installed, which is absurd and justified my exchanging of the phone.

It's hard to make a suggestion for your case, since you're not getting the ridiculous 10-12 hour battery life I was, but also not getting the 36-48 hour battery life that myself now and others are seeing. If it were me, I'd focus on apps and try uninstalling big chunks each day, like 1/3rd of your apps for a full day, then 1/3rd more the next day, etc., and see what effect it has on your battery life. It'll make for a miserable three days of phone usability, time warping back to an app-less 2005, but it beats fighting the phone for a few weeks trying to isolate the problem, ya know? Pull that Band-Aid off quickly!

I'd also be curious as to what your battery life would be going for a full day with no apps or games at all installed, aside from the built-in system stuff. This wouldn't necessarily prove it's apps going nuts with background tasks, though, since it sounds like you beat your battery like a rented mule, with playing MC4 for 30 minutes and so forth. A few rounds of Doodle Jump or Subway Surfers gets me through a restroom break and is about the longest gaming I do on the phone in one span.

You mentioned getting an estimated 20 hours now, with LTE off, but what were you getting (estimated) before with it on? You never said in your previous posts...

 

[Amy Hassett]

I have my own question but dont know how to start a new thread.....im new to windows phones and was just wondering if the battery charging icon is supposed to flash on and off???? If not how do i fix it...ive tried a couple of different chargers and always get the same result...and finally....although ive only had it for two days its been flashing on and pff but charged ok...is there any damage to not doing anything??

 

[Lundon44]

Well I did recall seeing an estimated 12 or so hours remaining on 100% battery. I immediately did a full battery discharge and full recharge and saw some improvements. So I now stand at 20hrs. Today I did a quick test. I turned off data for an hour and left only wifi connected to see if I lost battery and I lost about 5%. And that's without me using it during that hour. Tonight I threw my phone into airplane mode for 2-3 hours and lost 1%.

What this tells me is your best guess lol.. Maybe a rogue app.. Who knows. Clearly there is no easy way to tell. I might consider a hard reset just to test battery life on stock set up and go from there. Also not sure if I should assume its related to an app with a live tile. Ugh.. lots of work ahead of me..


EDIT: Last night I drained my battery to zero. Plugged it back in, turned on airplane mode and left it to recharge in hopes to recalibrate it further. Now with airplane mode on I would expect maximum battery life. I checked the battery this morning and it still only showed 20 hrs remaining at 100% with airplane mode on.



Would a rogue app cause battery drain on airplane mode??

 

[vipstheeccentric]

You do have the option to stop the phone from searching for nearby wifi's and also stop it from automatically connecting to public wifi hotspots.

 

[Tim J Meyer]

I just had the following battery issue. The last 2 mornings I woke up and my phone was only charged to about 75%. This is very odd as I always charge my phone while I am sleeping and it is always at 100% when I wake up. I drove to work (35 minutes) with it plugged in and streamed Slacker Radio and used Waze (but kept the screen off). When I got to work my battery was down to 58%. I know waze is a battery hog so the drop on the way to work is not surprising. I force quit waze when I arrived at work. Within 2 hours of being at work I was down below 50% with little use. I plugged it in and it was barely charging (1% in about a half hour).

I determined that Gmail was syncing constantly in the background. It was absolutely decimating my battery. I tried changing settings a few times for Gmail (reducing the frequency it retrieved mail and also reducing the amount of mail synced) but I could not get it to stop syncing. Finally I deleted the account entirely from the phone. Now my phone is plugged in and has charged back to about 80% within a half hour or 45 minutes. The problem seems to be solved for now.

As much as I want to like windows phone I am having a really hard time doing so. In the last 2 weeks I have had 2 Lumia 1020s and 2 1520s. All 4 had crappy battery life. I am about a day away from going back to my Samsung Galaxy s4 and abandoning windows phone altogether. The phone does me no good if I have to delete accounts and cripple all the features that enhance the quality of life. It isn't practical for me to be hooked up to a charger all day.

 

[jbowyer1]

I might consider a hard reset just to test battery life on stock set up and go from there.

Personally, I'd be curious to see you first try uninstalling all of your apps and games (except maybe the battery monitoring app) to see how your battery life is with just the OS. If you do a hard reset and it fixes it, you wouldn't know if it was something in the OS (email syncing, gps, wi-fi, LTE, who knows...) or a mischievous app...