WiFi and Battery Drain

[Robbed Time]

There are many complaints about battery drain with WP8.1.
Prior to upgrading my 820 to WP8.1 my battery would easily last me all day. Since the upgrade then my battery is almost flattened between taking it off charge at 7AM and leaving work at 5PM.
However, if I leave WiFi turned off all day then battery is fine. With the original WP8, WiFi was turned off when the screen was locked. I think with the GDR1 update an option was added that allowed WiFi to remain on when locked - I never enabled this feature to try to preserve my battery. With WP8.1 this option has vanished and WiFi, when enabled, is always on even when locked. I have blocked all background tasks and setup mail to sync daily, but WiFi is still left on. I could really do with an option in WP8.1 to automatically turn off WiFi. I know many people who rarely turn their WiFi on (people with unlimited Data contracts), however this would be a pain for me as I have no mobile coverage at home.
So some people are complaining that WP8.1 drains battery quicker and others saying that battery life is same or improved. I wonder if those complaining of excessive battery drain are those who keep WiFi turned on. Lumia 820 users have a pathetically low capacity battery, so WiFi always on seems a real problem.
Has anyone else noticed this ?

 

[foxbat121]

Keep wi-fi on or off has very negligible impact on battery life, IMO, based on my experiment. The feature you are looking for is only missing on Lumia phones. Other brands like HTC and Samsung phones still have this option.

On my 1520, I noticed you will have to open the Glance settings page at least once so that it will ask you to reboot the phone. Without doing it, it seems to drain a lot of battery waiting for you.

But overall, other than first day of excessive battery drain, my 1520 has been back to normal and I leave wifi on ALL the time even out of my house.

 

[Miti 1982]

I have seen the same issue but I haven't tested with Wi-Fi turned off.

My Lumia 920 would normally do 1 to 1.5 days with normal usage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on.

After the update it hardly makes 12 hours... I really do not need Wi-Fi to be turned on at all times if that will help save battery.

I hope this is fixed by the summer release.... I would expect the new version to have the same if not better battery management, not worse.

Anyone else having the same issues?

 

[DavidinCT]

WIFI will drain at a higher amount if is not in a Wi-FI area, so if you have a long commute and it's polling for wifi all the time, it will drain the battery when searching. This is not just on Windows Phone, most phones suffer from that.

I noticed on the ICON and 8.1 completly disabling Wi-FI helped a little (including the Wi-FI sense and set Wi-FI to be put on manually)....I do have a unlmited plan.

 

[EwingMCSE]

This does help, but my Lumia Icon drains completely in just 3-4 hours of standby after the 8.1 upgrade. And this is with wifi, Bluetooth, and location services disabled. It doesn't have even 1/10th the battery life it did before the update. I love the new features, but this update has basically destroyed my phone until they patch it. It might as well be a landline now.

 

[FelipeVenhorst]

I can?t say mine was affected, since I?m messing around more with the phone, checking changes, what I noticed is that, before my 920 using Insider it was showing lets say 90% battery and 1 day and 4 hours and now its 80% and the same amount of time. Another thing that call my attention, I don?t know if this is really going on, when I?m on WiFi the data signal, E, H, H+ disapeared, like when using wi-fi data use is disabled, just walk to a place with wi-fi and the H is back.
My Wi-Fi is always on, only disabled when I?m on places without wi-fi.

I have a interesting experience with my wife?s Lumia 720, she doesn?t use much, so the battery is Always at 5 days left, few weeks ago, she did some travel and used the phone a lot, gps, whatsapp, e-mail and after that, its starting showing after full charge only 2 1/2 days, and for a few days was like that, now since she is back to its normal use, the battery duration is coming back, now, 1 week after it shows 3 1/2 day, and appears to be going up.

 

[Jaafarj]

Same. I was shocked at how fast my battery drained today :-/ What's worse is its been on charge since 6pm (its 10:15 now) and its only reached 80%..my l620 took 2/3 hours MAX to go to full battery levels

Also when I take out the charger, it says 10 hours remaining..it used to give me 36!!! Its like a landline now :-/

 

[jdsouza@gmail.com]

I noticed my battery life got better once I disabled IE from running in the background.

 

[ritojr]

Im curious if anyone else has found any tips or tricks? I very rarely turn my wifi on, bluetooth is always off. I dont use my phone a ton other than for texting, making calls, checking out some web pages and facebook. I used to average 2 days and 2 hours between charges, since the update last week I am probably averaging around 24 hours between charges. If I even look at my phone the wrong way it will lose 5-10% in an instant. Just a product of some bugs with the 8.1 preview and hopefully will get better with updates? Running all the same setting as before (as far as things like glance, email sync, etc)

 

[_Emi_]

it sucks for some people Microsoft decided to change the old wifi is turned off when screen was off, like wp7. I like to turn my phone on and know I will get the messages when I want to. now I have to manually turn Wifi off, not like I will die, but my sister and mom aren't used to that. so their batteries drain faster. some people say HTC phones have the option to be like it was before, so it sucks to have a Lumia.but disabling wifi manually, and other background stuff, and checking my mail settings, I seemed to get almost 48 hours of light use. so I know I would get the same battery life I was getting before, as longs as I dont forget to turn wifi off.

 

[EwingMCSE]

Once I resolved my other Windows 8.1 preview battery issues I can't say I'm noticing the drain from leaving wifi enabled 24/7 (which I do).

Battery life isn't stellar, but I have wifi and Bluetooth on for the entire day now even though I don't have wifi at work.

Biggest issues for me seemed to be turning off battery saver, synchronization settings and making sure the number of apps that can use location services is at a bare minimum.

 

[Robbed Time]

So on Tuesday I did a factory reset and the battery drain seems greatly improved. Possibly even better now than 8.0.

The phone is set up as before. To give a fuller picture:- all background apps disabled except battery saver, data usually disabled (limited plan), WiFi always on and normally in coverage, no Cortana as outside US, location on, location on, IE syncing all disabled.

 

[Will6371]

WiFi sense is also a killer.

I have always found that the battery was better with WiFi on all the time.

 

[The Sand]

I have a Lumia 920 and have the exact same problem with battery drain on wifi. I can literally watch the battery drain when using wifi. On the cellular network it is stellar and I can do the exact same things (I change no settings, they are the same as when running on wifi) with NO battery drain.

It is so bad I don't want to use wifi anymore.

I hope they figure out why this is happening and address it because the battery difference from running on wifi as opposed to the cellular network is absolutely glaring!