Dodgy battery or WP8.1?

[sejgiul]

My battery has been absolutely horrendous since WP8.1, I don't mean a couple of hours shorter, I mean a drain of 1% per minute when using my L620. I know this is not normal even on Android. I've experienced a 10-20% loss in battery on Android while playing really intensive games, but on WP8 I've never had this before.

When using normal apps such as facebook and FB messenger the drain is upwards of 10% an hour. I started at 100% this morning at 7, I'm now on 31% (6 hours later...).

Absolutely ridonkulous. This is after a fresh wipe over the weekend (Nokia Care suite back to black and update to WP8.1).

Not sure what to do... Go back to WP8 and Black? Or do I have a dodgy battery?

 

[Muessig]

When you say you did a wipe, did you select 'reset your phone' from settings>about? If you did and you had to completely start over and set up your phone again and you are still experiencing this kind of drain I'd recommend trying wp8 again and see if that fixes your issue. If it doesn't it's likely to be a hardware issue.

 

[BaritoneGuy]

I have noticed similar things that have however settled down to normal. One of the issues I believe is now that WP supports device wide search that there is an indexing process that runs in the background after initial setup. This is similar to what happens on a PC after a fresh install. Also for me I turned off WiFi sense and it seemed to help as well.

I got through the entire day yesterday with over 60% at the end still remaining.

 

[sejgiul]

I have once again reset my phone using Nokia Care Suite to install GDR3 + black as fresh. Back on WP8 things are not much better. I updated all apps etc, charged it a bit to 48%, used it a bit, rebooted and it was back up to 48%. Then I decided to take the battery out and clean it. After booting it up, it's gone down to 22%. Then I restarted again and now it's on 18%.

I will continue to monitor what happens. I will charge fully and then report back with my findings.

Thanks for the input so far guys. I do expect a dodgy battery though as I did not have these issue on my L520 or my partner's L625.

 

[primortal]

Did you install any apps after doing a hard reset or left it as stock? If you installed any apps, uninstall them and leave the phone as stock and see how the drain is.

Disable WiFi and NFC and see how the drain is. Then turn them back on one-by-one after a period of time to see if one of them is the culprit.

 

[zorb58]

Location services is a disaster in 8.1.

The steep drop represents about an hour of navigation with Here Drive. You can see the discharge starts shortly before 6 AM and stops at about 7:30. When I started my travels, I was at 98%:

 

[praveen9663]

Windows 8.1 is not at all Battery hunger,in fact My Lumia 625 battery is boosted....Better Try "Reset phone" after installing W8.1....If already tried then leave battery to dry completely (handset turned off) after that connect your charger....definitely your battery will boosted its my own experience(W8 with GDR1) ...PLEASE NOTE : All Battery has 40 Life cycles(Low Battery) so don't attempt if you already cross this limit that may result in damage of Battery....

 

[sejgiul]

I have found the root problem. It's the battery. Yesterday afternoon after the battery reported a drop from 48% to 22%, I decided to check the voltage on it. So I took the battery out, measured the voltage at 3.76 (which isn't particularly good, but shouldn't cause a problem) and inserted the battery again, only to find my phone wouldn't turn on and showing the white battery icon with a red fill when plugging it in for charging.

After leaving it on charge for about 6 hours, and the phone getting hot, I decided to unplug it to prevent any damage to the phone. The battery did not charge (I also tried it in a L520) and I have had to declare it officially dead at approx. 22:00 last night.

On the point of resetting after installing 8.1, I don't like to do that as it seems to delete all the nokia specific settings from the settings menu.

 

[Shobin Drogan]

hang on a minute are you 100% sure its your battery? My 620 is facing the SAME exact problem.
Back then after a full charge before i sleep, i leave it on standby it drains about 3-4% sometimes even just 2% but now its 15-20%.
Awful, awful battery life.

 

[sejgiul]

hang on a minute are you 100% sure its your battery? My 620 is facing the SAME exact problem.
Back then after a full charge before i sleep, i leave it on standby it drains about 3-4% sometimes even just 2% but now its 15-20%.
Awful, awful battery life.

Well, whatever you do. Don't remove the battery. It's dead lol. I've bought a ?3 one from ebay to replace it because apparently Nokia have a 6 month warranty on batteries, and not 1 year...

 

[Maritox Cacici]

So i did a hard reset with my 8.1, and now when i full charge my battery it says 2 days!
I never had that life expectation on the status bar, right after unplugging the charger i used to get 1 day and 2 hours as much.
of course after the hard reset i being installing all my apps back so the battery will last a while only, i hope that after i get everything set it gets to last that much. I heard sometimes the battery monitor of the phone thinks its empty and its not...maybe the hard reset and 8.1 got adjusted now?
hope so!

If so then thats a good reason to do a hard reset after 8.1 installation

 

[sejgiul]

Last night I decided to inspect the battery because I was missing my phone all day yesterday, and lo and behold, I managed to fix the battery!

The problem was the small connections at the top of the battery. There are three connectors on the battery, that basically, look like this: |_| |_| |_|, with a little inward curve at the top. Now, those connectors were widened and therefore not making a connection with the phone itself. After taking a needle to it, I managed to push each of them closer together again, making for a nice tight fitting of the battery of the phone. And surprise surprise, it works again! Can't believe I didn't think of this the other night...

This, I think would also explain sudden drops in battery percentage reported on the phone. A poor connection would explain why this has happened to me, and perhaps also a lot of other people. If you seem to experience problems, take a closer look at the battery connectors on top of your battery. They seem very wonky and can move easily...

Thanks for all your input guys, and I am glad to have resolved the problem!