How I solved my battery drain on my lumia 1020

[Live2Deliver]

This may help in OP's cause:
Battery Calibration – Battery University
But don't do it too frequently:
How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries - Battery University

 

[Joven Catibog]

22% per hour while browsing. With all apps allowed in background. Idle for about 2-4%

 

[Christopher Lindsay]

Nice post Julian_C. You put it into very understandable terms. For a more technical explanation, here's a heavily modified post I made a while back:

Pay no attention to the specific numbers in this post, they are very specific per device and battery. I do not know the exact specification of the 1020 and made them up off the top of my head.

Some Points to Observe:

1. Your device reads a voltage from the battery.
2. The battery was built to output between 0 and 4.2V.
3. Ideally, this means that 0% = 0V and 100% = 4.2V. When it is charged, it will output 4.2V, and that value will decrease the more it is used.
4. Realistically, your phone was designed to run at 3.7V. It will still function with variations though.
5. The circuit board on your phone will not function at all below 2V.
6. The battery itself will be damaged if it is below 1V.
7. The battery knows that last point. If it is below 1.8V, it will tell the phone it has 0V and will shut off to protect itself.
8. Your phone has a safety circuit that knows the last 3 points. In order to protect itself and the battery, it will shut off entirely at 2.5V
9. Your operating system doesn't really know the exact points for those events. It just has a general idea. So it will shutdown with that low battery alert around 3.2V and will not boot up.
10. Your operating system also doesn't know what voltage is 100%, and your battery was not built exactly the same as the ideal battery, plus your battery may be a few months old!
11. That last point means: When you first got it, 4.18V was actually 100%. But now that it's been used a lot, 4.01V is now 100%. The last time your phone was fully charged, it reached 100% at 4.11V.
12. The next time you charge your phone, the battery will stop accepting charge at 4.01V and your phone will say "Oh, 100% is now 4.01V."
13. BUT! As batteries discharge, they don't follow a linear path. It's a curve that accelerates downward as the battery discharges. So now, it's going to discharge faster! Also, you haven't let it die in a long time.
14. That last point means your operating system has very little idea of when your battery will actually be dead, and it has to guess how fast it will discharge!

To summarize:

• While you're charging your phone, it may say 99% for a longer time that other numbers. Why is that? Because it was expecting to reach 100% at 4.0V but instead it kept accepting charge. When it stops accepting charge, that's when its full!
• Your phone seems to hold charge at 90% for years, but then plummets after! Why is that? Well, most phones don't take into account that a battery's voltage will go down faster the weaker the charge they hold (example). In my opinion, Windows Phone tries to take this into account. That means 80% should last about as long as 50% and about as long as 20%. But it won't be perfect, and it will make it seem like it's draining faster than older phones that don't take this into account!
• Your phone doesn't know what 0% is! It will try to guess each time you drain your phone, but the more you drain your phone, the more you damage its capacity.

My recommendations:

• Prioritize keeping your phone's battery between 70% and 80%, and keep it's temperature cool (not really discussed above). This will maximize its life and minimize wear. Unfortunately, it may mean your battery gauge is not calibrated. But who cares? It's just a number that will never be 100% accurate! Let it keep guessing, and work with what you have. If you do this, you'll keep a roughly 5-15% deviation. No big deal to me.
• Don't leave the battery at 100% for too long, but don't worry about charging it to 100%! It's way better than leaving it at 0%.
• Don't let your battery reach 0% often. If you really want to calibrate the meter here and there, or if you can't get to a charger, a few times is not going to have much of a long-term effect. But doing it on a regular, and frequent, basis will cause long-term damage.
• I didn't get into it, but extreme temperature damage the battery. Prioritize keeping it slightly below room temperature for ideal conditions. That may mean stopping your games/gps/other power intensive apps that overheat the battery.
• Along those lines, rapid charging and rapid discharging damages the battery long-term. So if you use your device as a hard-core gaming device, you will have poor battery life, and it will only help degrade the battery. If you charge your phone with a 4A charger, you will similarly damage the battery long-term (will not be noticeable for a while though!)

I'll re-read this later, my brains a little scattered and this took longer to type than I anticipated, but I hope it helps someone. Thanks again for starting this thread Julian_C!

Also, disclaimer: The above is based on my knowledge and experimentation. I am a recent graduate of Electrical Engineering, and am far from an expert. Please feel free to correct me where I am wrong! I make no claim of accuracy in my statements.

How would you suggest we go about calibrating our batteries?

 

[sharadh]

22% per hour while browsing. With all apps allowed in background. Idle for about 2-4%

mine has the exact same problem...discharge rate while using whastapp reaches 22% and while the phone is idle...it stays below 3%...! although this re-calibration has improved the battery life a little...but its not like it was before this problem appeared...even moderate usage gives 18 hrs of battery life!

 

[saibalajisingh]

This is the problem with my lumia 1020
after updating it to windows 8.1
my phone it self is using the most of my battery and increasing its draing speed
my battery discharge speed increased suddenly one day from 2.34% to 6.93%
every thing in the background task is off.
but after so many unresponsive tries i am posting this
can any body give me some suggestion to solve it

 

[Christopher Lindsay]

Tried this but my phone did not turn back on after hitting zero.

 

[hutzero]

About 8 months since I have got the Lumia 1020, every day from 7.00 to 18.00 o'clock the battery will remain from 100% to 70%.

I tried to "hard reset" many times, it does not matter.

But this week after I send it to a Nokia Care (for claiming Mic), the battery remain from 100% to 99% at 18.00 o'clock with similar Apps, same usage and the same version of FW (WP8.1 Developer Preview).

This is amazing for me and I think it must be something that Nokia did not tell us.

 

[Joven Catibog]

About 8 months since I have got the Lumia 1020, every day from 7.00 to 18.00 o'clock the battery will remain from 100% to 70%.

I tried to "hard reset" many times, it does not matter.

But this week after I send it to a Nokia Care (for claiming Mic), the battery remain from 100% to 99% at 18.00 o'clock with similar Apps, same usage and the same version of FW (WP8.1 Developer Preview).

This is amazing for me and I think it must be something that Nokia did not tell us.

How they repaired your phone if you installed 8.1 preview for developer? They say installing pfd may Nullify warranty.

 

[Zomby Jeezus]

Hope

 

[vyjayanthi srinivasan]

Hi, i just bought a Lumia 1020 and i did try following ur advice. My phone did switch off after a full drain and wen i tried to switch it back on it dint. So put it to charge again. I had already charged my phone about 5 times before i read this post of urs. Do i still proceed? My battery lasted me 5 hours with full wifi, no battery saver, i listened to songs for about half an hour, was whatsapping full time and even edited one or 2 pics on my lumia camera.

 

[jasoner1141]

Hi there, i am having the battery issue as well will look into the guide.

Just to check does my battery drain life normal as compare to my HTC one M7. It drained way too fast.

Below the comparison :

Fligth Mode
Lumia 1020 - 6 hrs ( 86 - 30%) - 9.3% / hrs
HTC One - 6 hrs (84 - 83% )

After Soft & Hard Reset
Lumia 1020 - 7 hrs (90 - 36%) - 7.7% / hrs
HTC One - 7 hrs (82 - 81%)

After hard reset the battery life seem got some improvement
How much normal battery draining as it drain really fast even in flight mode. Thanks.

 

[Marko Marjanovic]

*saving this to try later*

 

[ahsan_aa]

How would you suggest we go about calibrating our batteries?

Thank you for all the detailed information..

You think i can try the same procedure on my Lumia 1520 ?

 

[ahsan_aa]

Hey guys,

Yes you read right! I've waited a few weeks to be secure but now I get decent battery lifes on my 1020 (if you search a little bit, you can find out I had serious battery drain problems too!!) So I hope I can help you with this :smile: also remember it needs a few days to get the maximum out of it, it won't work immediately, so please don't comment negative things immediately, thx.

My current settings:
-my phone Signal is good most times (max. speed is set to 3G)-when its possible use wifi
-bluetooth only when I need it (no big deal with the action center), NFC off, location on
-DISABLED onedrive picture auto upload!
-brightness auto, glance to peek and double tap to wake up off
-disabled a few background tasks but not all (like whatsapp, fb, wheater flow, 6tag, wpcentral, mytube, battery, etc is on)
-also I don't know if it matters, but I replaced my sim-card (I read that in very rare cases it caused a battery drain -->google) just FYI

But to the main part:
First of all I had draining issues, battery indicator percentage issues etc ( I also sent it to nokia care, but they only replaced my battery, nothing else but this is not important, because it doesn't matter). The Main problem of (my) lumia 1020 was the battery calibration by the OS itself!! Don't trust the battery percentage indicator, it's wrong! Your battery is ok but the wrong percentage causes that the OS thinks, it's empty, even when it's NOT. You don't believe me? Connect it to Nokia Care Suite, set your device to TEST mode and make a "charging test", when you read your battery state, you will see a different percentage (than the one on your phones screen). So what can you do?
-Charge your Phone to 100% with flight mode. leave it on 100% for another hour before unplugging it.
-Now use your phone as usual and decharge it to 0%
-When the phone shut down by itself, it's actually not empty! When you try to turn it on again you will se the big blinking battery on the screen. Wait ~10-15 mins then it will turn on again (once my phone turned of with 0% and I got only the blinking battery, after 10 min I could turn it on, I had 13% left and could use it for another 6 hours! - This was what I meant with wrong calibration)
-Repeat this until your phone is dead (it doesn't vibrate anymore when trying to turn it on), now when you charge it, the windows button led will blink for a few minutes
-Charge the phone again to 100% without an interruption and leave it again an addtional hour
-Repeat all the steps mentioned here at least 5-6 times (charging-decharging until dead-charging- ...) therefore I said it wont work immediately. Patience please!!

Only by this way you can tell your OS/Firmware/Phone what 100% are and 0%. The high drain comes from that your phone is e.g. thinkig that at 40%it's empty and it turns off which is not true, but it shows you it went from 100 to 0.

But remember, also when I updatet it to 8.1 I had a few charges with a terrible life again but now after a week it got normal again. Sometimes the OS needs some time for hisself

I hope I could help you and share this please if it worked for you! I put a lot of effort in finding this solution

Now with moderate/high use I get a round 5% per hour, so I can easily last a day. Using the phone not much I also managed a few times to get it last over 2 days and a few hours!! Which was unimaginable a month ago!!

Greeting Julian :smile:

Hi julian thanks for the great information,
my problem here is that my battery doesnt even charge more than 82 % (even if i keep it more than an hour after reaching 82%, it`ll just go couple of %s more n be back to 82-83%)
i dont really suspect the life of battery, since i can use my phone more than 6=7 hours when it keeps showing me the battery level below 10.

I have started to believe your theory that its kindda false alarm (i mean showing the percentage of battery)

what do you suggest me?

thanks in advance