Always on Wi-Fi a possible cause for battery drain?

[UzEE]

Like many (most?) others, I've been suffering from very poor battery life on my Lumia 920 ever since the upgrade to 8.1. It went from lasting nearly two days to only about 12 hours with similar usage.

My guess is that the new Wi-Fi Sense features might be one of the factors at play here. Previously (in 8.0) we had the option to choose weather the phone should keep the Wi-Fi connection alive even when the screen is off. And I, like most others preferred it to be off when I wasn't using the device and resort to mobile data for background tasks. This option seems to be gone now in 8.1 and my phone's Wi-Fi is always on despite me not even turning the screen on for over an hour.

While it might not be a the single biggest reason for the massive battery drain, it certainly is a factor. If anyone has ideas about disabling the new functionality and reverting to the old method, I'm all ears.

 

[maxpower818]

I think it's the GPS. Cortana won't work without it and think most people keep it on all the time now. I noticed a massive improvement in my battery by just turning off the GPS.

 

[Will6371]

I have WiFi on all the time but I have WiFi sense off. Location on but turned off in all the apps except for Cortana and maps. I have numerous apps allowed to update, 12 in total I think and I get 0.02% per hour battery usage on my 1520 and with the same settings on my 925 I am getting a 0.9% per hour loss.

Glance set to peek on both. That is of course over 8 hours at night when both phones are beside each other on the table.

I read somewhere (think it was an article on here) that it is best to leave WiFi on all the time as it uses less battery to pull the data with it over 3g or 4g

 

[T Moore]

Windows Phone 8.1 preview for developers is not an upgrade or update.
The Preview program was created to give developers time to test their apps, and to validate that their apps run as expected on a real phone before an operating system update is made generally available.

 

[UzEE]

I have WiFi on all the time but I have WiFi sense off. Location on but turned off in all the apps except for Cortana and maps. I have numerous apps allowed to update, 12 in total I think and I get 0.02% per hour battery usage on my 1520 and with the same settings on my 925 I am getting a 0.9% per hour loss.

Glance set to peek on both. That is of course over 8 hours at night when both phones are beside each other on the table.

I read somewhere (think it was an article on here) that it is best to leave WiFi on all the time as it uses less battery to pull the data with it over 3g or 4g

I have over 100 apps and games installed (I'm a developer and like to keep up with the ecosystem). I have location on and any app that wants it can use it (I also develop location based apps so that's one more reason).

And yes its much better for the battery to keep Wi-Fi on at times when you know you are going to be frequently using your phone. Connection discovery takes a lot of toll on the device. But I don't have 3G / 4G coverage where I live so I'm mostly on 2G but LTE rollout just started in my country and since I live in the 2nd biggest city I would probably be on an LTE or at least an HSPA+ connection in about a month.

But what I was trying to point out is that 8.0 was smart enough to turn of the Wi-Fi when you didn't use the device for a while (in a meeting, a class or when you're asleep) and 8.1 doesn't do that. A much more elegant solution would have been that if you haven't used your phone for say more than 30 minutes, then it should automatically drop the Wi-Fi connection and switch to 2G data (which is actually quite good for background stuff like push notifications and OneDrive photo uploads). That way it would be able to preserve more battery.