Battery Drain While Turned Off

[RicKaysen]

I don't monitor this board every day and a previous discussion may have addressed this but I don't see it pop up typing the title. I don't use my i5/4/128 SP4 daily it might be a week before I find a need to turn it on, but when I do I find the battery has drained significantly. Now, I never use sleep or hibernate modes and always shut down completely after use. I fully charged my SP4 after the last time I used it and when I booted up this morning it had 2 hours of battery left. After poking around the net for solutions, I turned off quick start hoping that might be the culprit. Is there any consensus as to what causes such a battery drain when the unit is totally shut down? I bought mine on launch day and it's too late to return it, but I sure wish I simply got an ultrabook for half the price.

 

[billyboyblue]

By design, it's going to lose some capacity when it's turned off. Their are many, many factors for this.
However, i'd suggest doing the following things in order to provide the best guesstimate to your problem.

Hit windows key + x, and open CMD prompt ( as admin )
Then type this : powercfg /batteryreport /output C:\battery_test.html

Once that'd done, type : start c:\battery_test.html

IF you can, try to get a screen shot of the entire screen and paste it here. You'll have to do it in pieces, because it's a long post. This will give you a general Idea of what's going on with your battery, including the capacity, and what you're actually charging it to. It could just be as simple as a bad battery. However, you will see some drain, but " significant " is in the eye of the beholder. 2 weeks with no usage, I'd expect to see it down about 10%, maybe with a variable error difference of 2 - 3%.

 

[RicKaysen]

By design, it's going to lose some capacity when it's turned off. Their are many, many factors for this.
However, i'd suggest doing the following things in order to provide the best guesstimate to your problem.

Hit windows key + x, and open CMD prompt ( as admin )
Then type this : powercfg /batteryreport /output C:\battery_test.html

Once that'd done, type : start c:\battery_test.html

IF you can, try to get a screen shot of the entire screen and paste it here. You'll have to do it in pieces, because it's a long post. This will give you a general Idea of what's going on with your battery, including the capacity, and what you're actually charging it to. It could just be as simple as a bad battery. However, you will see some drain, but " significant " is in the eye of the beholder. 2 weeks with no usage, I'd expect to see it down about 10%, maybe with a variable error difference of 2 - 3%.

Thanks for that information. I'll try do do as you suggest later today. I wouldn't have an issue with 10% discharge, but after two days off the charger to see only a couple hours of battery left was disconcerting.

 

[billyboyblue]

Thanks for that information. I'll try do do as you suggest later today. I wouldn't have an issue with 10% discharge, but after two days off the charger to see only a couple hours of battery left was disconcerting.

I would strongly suggest if the device is new, don't pay any attention to that. It takes a while to build up an accurate ( well... semi accurate ) guesstimate of battery life. you'll see this when you run the battery report, it stores all of your cycles, and the usage between charges. It's an invaluable tool for sure!

 

[RicKaysen]

By design, it's going to lose some capacity when it's turned off. Their are many, many factors for this.
However, i'd suggest doing the following things in order to provide the best guesstimate to your problem.

Hit windows key + x, and open CMD prompt ( as admin )
Then type this : powercfg /batteryreport /output C:\battery_test.html

Once that'd done, type : start c:\battery_test.html

IF you can, try to get a screen shot of the entire screen and paste it here. You'll have to do it in pieces, because it's a long post. This will give you a general Idea of what's going on with your battery, including the capacity, and what you're actually charging it to. It could just be as simple as a bad battery. However, you will see some drain, but " significant " is in the eye of the beholder. 2 weeks with no usage, I'd expect to see it down about 10%, maybe with a variable error difference of 2 - 3%.

I've tried several times with and without what appear to be spaces in the command line and I keep getting an "invalid parameters" error.

 

[Dush Ku]

I wonder if disabling Fast Startup would affect things.

 

[RicKaysen]

I wonder if disabling Fast Startup would affect things.

Well, just this minute, I started up my SP4 after disabling fast start up a couple days ago. I find my battery is at 96% which is a heck of a lot better than before. So, for me, doing that one thing helped a lot.

 

[GatsbyGlen]

Well, just this minute, I started up my SP4 after disabling fast start up a couple days ago. I find my battery is at 96% which is a heck of a lot better than before. So, for me, doing that one thing helped a lot.

Yes, I've seen this mentioned elsewhere on here and on other sites. I think the problem is that when you go to shutdown, it tries to save state when fast startup is turned on. During that process, something goes wrong and so the device never really shuts down. If there was and indicator light or something on the device you might see that. I encountered this error years ago with a Samsung laptop. I would go to turn it off, but it never would and the light remained on. Turning Fast-Startup off (or turning off hibernation) resolved the issue.

 

[Sabrinsche]

I have the same problem. Will try disabling fast startup to see if it helps, thanks for the tipp!

But here's a strange thing: I just ran the battery test and the file gives all the battery specs in mWh. Apparently, the SP4 is supposed to have around 40,000 mWh of capacity, but mine shows 37 or 38 mWh all the way through.

I run a German version of Windows, could that be the reason? The battery report is in English, though. It seems a little strange that my figures are off by factor 1,000 when clearly my battery has a capacity in the normal range. Or am I missing something here?

 

[jrhurley]

I have disabled fast startup and I am seeing a more stable system, I even got up to 8 hours of battery life at one point on 2/1 but I am avetaging about 4. 5 hours at this time. I also have not seen the mysterious hardware error that kept showing up in the reliability history since I made this change.

Keeping fingers crossed on this etc....