[Q] battery drain on wifi - Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III

I know this topic has been beaten to death but I haven't really seen any clear solutions to this. I'm running stock JB rooted on galaxy s3. My battery drains considerably faster when on wifi-standby. When on LTE, I lose around 1% every hour to hour and a half. On wifi, I'm losing 1% every 20mins or so. There have been some posts online about how this has to do with DHCP. I spend most of my time in a hospital so I can't really control the router and have the phone connect with static IP. I've tried using my friend's iphone 5 and it doesn't seem to have the same problem so this seems samsung specific. Is there any fix out there?

Your phone isnt sleeping on wifi for some reason most likely. Does it do it on other wifi networks too? Or is draining on the hospitals wifi only?

x714x said:
Your phone isnt sleeping on wifi for some reason most likely. Does it do it on other wifi networks too? Or is draining on the hospitals wifi only?
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It's draining faster at my home wifi also. In 2 hours, the phone has spent 28 minutes in wlan_rx_wake.

Related

use wifi or not?

From a battery perspective, should I use wifi? Most of the time i'm at home or at work where I have wifi. I also have good lte coverage at both. Speed aside, will I save battery by not using wifi or not?
You'll definitely save battery by using wifi when you can connect. I love the speeds over lte, but it is definitely a hog...
i also had boost of battery using WIFI
Using unlimited data plan makes me to consider using 4g, but I found that Wifi consumes much less battery.
Use wifi. The battery savings are huge.
yes i cant stress enough, wifi saves enormous amounts of battery so use it when ever possible. the difference is like night and day.
Compared to 3G
I've been leaving my wifi off since I have unlimited data and the 3G is pretty fast in my area, no 4G yet.
I've had pretty good battery life lately using only 3G, I'll have to do a few tests and see which one and I'm a fairly heavy user I'm approaching 4GB this month and none of that is tethering
3G or Wifi
Tested watching a streaming video of 22 mins
on 3G I lost 13%
on wifi I lost 8%
Wifi wins, of course standby is probably different, if 3G vs wifi loses this badly I'd have to imagine LTE vs Wifi is a slaughter battery wise
Actually I found something interesting...
For some reason, even when I am home using Wifi, the battery drains faster than I thought. Where I live is like a strange signal spot. If I turn off my WiFi I can see my TBolt constantly switching between LTE and 3G, sometimes it stucks on 1xRTT for a while then goes right back to switching between connections. If I am at work (downtown LA) where the LTE is pretty well covered, I still use WiFi at the office, the battery BARELY drain at ALL.
My theory is that even when WiFi is active, the phone somehow STILL does the LTE/EvDO switching on the background does draining the battery.
If somehow the devs or VZW can tell the phone to STICK to EvDO/1xRTT instead of going back and forth with the LTE while WiFi data is on, it'll solve the problem.
Also just FYI, I have the latest radio and BMAF 1.5 remixed.
SteveDusa said:
Actually I found something interesting...
For some reason, even when I am home using Wifi, the battery drains faster than I thought. Where I live is like a strange signal spot. If I turn off my WiFi I can see my TBolt constantly switching between LTE and 3G, sometimes it stucks on 1xRTT for a while then goes right back to switching between connections. If I am at work (downtown LA) where the LTE is pretty well covered, I still use WiFi at the office, the battery BARELY drain at ALL.
My theory is that even when WiFi is active, the phone somehow STILL does the LTE/EvDO switching on the background does draining the battery.
If somehow the devs or VZW can tell the phone to STICK to EvDO/1xRTT instead of going back and forth with the LTE while WiFi data is on, it'll solve the problem.
Also just FYI, I have the latest radio and BMAF 1.5 remixed.
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pretty much correct. at least on the gsm side, when i connect to wifi at home, i can no longer see if the phone is on 3G or EDGE. but it definitely switches back and forth to those networks, while staying on wifi, you just dont see the icon switching, but its definitely happening. i dont see why cdma and 1x would be any different.
if this is the case then why don't you just turn data off when you are on wifi.
^_^_^'s tbolt
EEdaesung said:
if this is the case then why don't you just turn data off when you are on wifi.
^_^_^'s tbolt
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You are absolutly right! How come I never thought of that. Will do that when I get home tonight.
Thanks for the tip!
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App
Better yet get juice defender and automate it . Its very good app. Right now it says I'm almost adding fifty percent on to my battery.
I seem to be bucking the trend here, but LTE is working better for me than wifi. I usually have a good signal, so that's part of it.
The other part is that my wifi may be eating more juice than normal because the TB and my router may not be playing nice together. Ever since I added the TB to the network, I've had to reboot the router every coupla days. Before the TB, it was solid weeks on end.
Has anyone who is still having trouble on with batter on wifi set their wifi sleep policy to "Never" sleep? Mine is set to this and if I am home most of the day I will lose very little battery through out the day.
I believe by default the wifi is set to turn off after a period of time or when the screen is off so during this time I believe you are actually reverting back to using the vzw network. To turn wifi to always on go to settings>wireless>wifi settings>hit menu>advanced. The sleep policy is at the top, change sleep policy to never. This my reduce battery while not connected to wifi so I always use the power control widget to turn my wifi off completely while I am away from the house.
shovelheadhd said:
Has anyone who is still having trouble on with batter on wifi set their wifi sleep policy to "Never" sleep? Mine is set to this and if I am home most of the day I will lose very little battery through out the day.
I believe by default the wifi is set to turn off after a period of time or when the screen is off so during this time I believe you are actually reverting back to using the vzw network. To turn wifi to always on go to settings>wireless>wifi settings>hit menu>advanced. The sleep policy is at the top, change sleep policy to never. This my reduce battery while not connected to wifi so I always use the power control widget to turn my wifi off completely while I am away from the house.
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Oh yeah this is very important, set wifi sleep policy to never greatly increases battery life. Otherwise it switches back to 3g when screen goes off and drains way more battery. This is very important to set this otherwise you wont see the increase.
Is strongly recommend switching to cdma only if yore gonna use WiFi and plan on saving your battery. Otherwise what's the point. I personally don't even bother using WiFi just use LTE only mode. I'm getting better speeds than most WiFi connections using my LTE.
Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk

Does Wifi Save Battery vs Cullular connection?

If your connected to wifi and using it, are you gonna get better battery life VS being connected to either 3g or 4g/hspa+?
and Why if so?
Shoot im sorry, this shouldnt be in this forum. I thought I was in the general questions forums. MY bad people. Please move mods.
smashpunks said:
Shoot im sorry, this shouldnt be in this forum. I thought I was in the general questions forums. MY bad people. Please move mods.
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This is the General forum. To answer your question, Yes it would use less battery on WiFi. On a data connection the signal is not a constant and the phone is always looking for a stronger signal.
Thanks, thats what I thought. And ive noticed that connected to wifi my battery lasts a lot longer.
smashpunks said:
Thanks, thats what I thought. And ive noticed that connected to wifi my battery lasts a lot longer.
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yes. And 4g eats your battery.
When I am only using the phone for data, I use WiFi when available. I turn on airplane mode then activate WiFi.
I don't know about that... when I'm on wifi my battery drains like a mofo. Weapon 3.0 ICS theme faux 1.3 kernel.
On every ROM and Kernel I've tried, Wi-Fi uses much, much less battery than 4G. I haven't tried any of the toggles / battery saving apps though so I'm not sure what effect those might have.
NeKr0MAtiK said:
I don't know about that... when I'm on wifi my battery drains like a mofo. Weapon 3.0 ICS theme faux 1.3 kernel.
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Do you disable data when you use wifi?
buru898 said:
Do you disable data when you use wifi?
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He shouldn't have to. If he's draining faster on WiFi then something is screwy with his setup.
On stock, cyanogenmod 7.1, and cyanogenmod 7.1 with various other kernels I've experienced increased battery drain with wi-fi on and connected with the phone sitting at home the entire day. Turn off wi-fi and let it just use the data connection to T-Mobile and I get drastically increased battery times. I'm assuming those of you who get better battery with wi-fi on are in extremely bad signal areas. Also, if you're on cyanogenmod have you turned off the auto wi-fi disconnect when sleeping feature? If you haven't then your battery life when sleeping should be the same as that of wi-fi turned off.
Wi-fi should always be priority if your in range.
Well my personal experience has been that wi-fi eats up battery like crazy. Same thing happens to the other smartphone users I know around here so I was surprised to see that people get better battery times with wi-fi on. Are you guys completely turning off your cellular radio? I don't like the quality and slight delay of wi-fi calling so my cellular radio stays on when I have wi-fi on.
I don't usually notice much difference between wifi and 3g battery drain here (no 4G for tmo here).
As someone already posted, my drain is worst when 3g signal is poor, like when I'm at work and the metal building interferes with everything.
Have you tried checking logs while connected to wifi to see if maybe some app or service goes crazy?
Nothing fishy going on when wi-fi is on. I get about 10-14 hours on battery with wi-fi on and next to no use of the phone vs somewhere around 20+ hours with wi-fi off and similar extremely light use. I keep meaning to do some more standardized testing where I literally don't touch the phone but life gets in the way and I have to make/answer a call or txt or whatever so I can't nail down any hard numbers. Typical experience on a slow day for me is that if I forget my wi-fi is on, my battery will be somewhere in the 3-5% range when I'm getting ready for bed while if I hadn't left it on, I can go to sleep and wake up and it'll still be hanging in there.
GTWalling said:
This is the General forum. To answer your question, Yes it would use less battery on WiFi. On a data connection the signal is not a constant and the phone is always looking for a stronger signal.
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That's true, I've always believed that Wifi eats battery faster because someone(don't remember who) always told me that Wifi uses more battery because it processes data faster, but I always noticed that when I used 4g, it drains a lot faster.
I always blamed it on the ROM, but I can see that it's not the ROM's fault.

Lte vs 3g battery life

Will the phone have a longer battery life if the cell modem is set to 3g vs lte?
Sent from my Nexus 5 using xda app-developers app
Bump
Sent from my Nexus 5 using xda app-developers app
Yes, in my experience with the S4 it's a pretty big difference UNLESS you get a very strong LTE signal. I'm on tmobile and now have the N5 and use the 3G setting which is HSPA/+ Plenty fast for me for what I do. When I want some extra speed I'll kick on the LTE
Does anyone have a more detailed answer for this? I just got this phone yesterday so I haven't been able to find out myself yet, just with 5hour battery life from 100% to 4% on what will only be half of its normal day I'm looking for anything to help right now till I get a battery case. This phone is one of only two to have a LTE radio that is supposed to use 30% less power than usual so I'm wondering if that makes it as efficient if not more than 3G for idle in your pocket to light stuff like FlipBoard.
it would depend on the quality of the data connection. im in brooklyn nyc, and use lte on my nexus 5 exclusively, used to use it on my nexus 4 as well. with 3g(hspa+), on both my n5 and n4, i average about 4-4.5 hours screen on time. when using lte, i average about 5-6 hours screen on time on both my nexus 5 and 4. after noticing this difference, i use exclusively lte on both my devices, as i average an hour more screen on time when using exclusively lte.
herqulees said:
Does anyone have a more detailed answer for this? I just got this phone yesterday so I haven't been able to find out myself yet, just with 5hour battery life from 100% to 4% on what will only be half of its normal day I'm looking for anything to help right now till I get a battery case. This phone is one of only two to have a LTE radio that is supposed to use 30% less power than usual so I'm wondering if that makes it as efficient if not more than 3G for idle in your pocket to light stuff like FlipBoard.
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Serious battery drain can have many reasons. One is having LTE on, syncing on(if you just booted it up, and input your Google account and let all your apps sync and download, its gonna drain your battery fast the first time), having locations on and wifi enabled. If you are in an area with poor reception, your phone will drain more trying to find connection.
Sent from a potato
simms22 said:
it would depend on the quality of the data connection. im in brooklyn nyc, and use lte on my nexus 5 exclusively, used to use it on my nexus 4 as well. with 3g(hspa+), on both my n5 and n4, i average about 4-4.5 hours screen on time. when using lte, i average about 5-6 hours screen on time on both my nexus 5 and 4. after noticing this difference, i use exclusively lte on both my devices, as i average an hour more screen on time when using exclusively lte.
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Thanks for the information. That's what I was wondering but I couldn't find anyone that had already tested this with these new radios. If I get the time this weekend maybe I'll do my own test in detail to compare LTE to 3G. Am thinking of using a TV episode on Netflix and see which makes the battery drop faster over the 30 or so minutes.
Slightly off topic, does anyone's WiFi show as always on in the battery monitor even if its been off? Still trying to figure out my battery drain issue, if it even is an issue with just me, I bought this phone knowing it had a small battery.
herqulees said:
Thanks for the information. That's what I was wondering but I couldn't find anyone that had already tested this with these new radios. If I get the time this weekend maybe I'll do my own test in detail to compare LTE to 3G. Am thinking of using a TV episode on Netflix and see which makes the battery drop faster over the 30 or so minutes.
Slightly off topic, does anyone's WiFi show as always on in the battery monitor even if its been off? Still trying to figure out my battery drain issue, if it even is an issue with just me, I bought this phone knowing it had a small battery.
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go to the main phone settings, wifi, 3 dots on the bottom right, advanced, then disable scanning always available..
ill be interested in seeing your results
simms22 said:
go to the main phone settings, wifi, 3 dots on the bottom right, advanced, then disable scanning always available..
ill be interested in seeing your results
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Seems that's a whole other debate on weather leaving that on or turning it off helps battery life. Apparently if you turn it off then apps that want your location will turn the GPS on and waste battery (looking at you Facebook...), but if you leave it on the phone just tells the app your location from WiFi networks around you.
One thing I didn't think about is I had added my work WiFi yesterday but it wouldn't connect to it, wouldn't tell me why but I'm assuming it's because of bad signal as I'm a valet outside and the WiFi is from a bar across the street so I forgot about it but WiFi was left on with that network saved, my Nexus 7 can connect to it on most days and any laptop has no issues but with this being a phone I guess it doesn't have a big enough antenna. So I'm wondering if now that I deleted that WiFi network, and I always have my phone set to not notify me of public networks, if my battery won't die so fast today.
And now I'm just rambling but I just looked at my screenshot I took yesterday of battery use before plugging in at 4% and WiFi isn't even being shown on top six things that used the battery, lowest one being shown is a Chrome process using 3%.
EDIT: Well off to work now with my phone 100% charged, will have screen 100% (am outside in the sun), BT off, WiFi on (disconnected, no saved networks nearby, open network notifications off, always on during sleep, scanning always available, avoid poor connections, and WiFi optimization), LTE on/connected, NFC off. So lets see how things go. It will have tons of screen on time as all I do at work is read through FlipBoard, then if I run out of things on there I move to FB. Lets see how this goes...
http://www.qualcomm.com/media/docum...envelope-tracking-technology-3g4g-lte-devices
Nexus 5 has it and its doing its job saving battery
Sorry for digging up such an old thread, but with LTE my Nexus 6P, it switches between HSPA and 3G. When turned to 3G, nothing changes. Would that mean I would save battery?
Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

[Hidden battery drain] 97% Deep Sleep, 7% / h consumption

Hello everyone.
I've been running stock Lollipop on my Nexus 5 for the past week or so. Fully wiped when flashing the factory image.
I've noticed erratic battery consumption since then, but before Chainfire's latest Supersu, most battery apps didn't work well, so it wasn't easy to be sure of what was going on.
Last night I had this impossible battery drain. As you can see from the screenshots, my phone has been up for 7h 48m, in deep sleep for 7h 36m, with the screen on for 5 min, and awake for 11 minutes.
So how it could have consumed 7% battery per hour baffles me.
Has anyone noticed something like this?
Cheers,
TD
tylerdurden83 said:
Hello everyone.
I've been running stock Lollipop on my Nexus 5 for the past week or so. Fully wiped when flashing the factory image.
I've noticed erratic battery consumption since then, but before Chainfire's latest Supersu, most battery apps didn't work well, so it wasn't easy to be sure of what was going on.
Last night I had this impossible battery drain. As you can see from the screenshots, my phone has been up for 7h 48m, in deep sleep for 7h 36m, with the screen on for 5 min, and awake for 11 minutes.
So how it could have consumed 7% battery per hour baffles me.
Has anyone noticed something like this?
Cheers,
TD
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Dunno but you have unknown signal 100%. You get this when your wifi is connected, but your wifi was only connected 14%... So what was happening with your signal for the other 86%?
rootSU said:
Dunno but you have unknown signal 100%. You get this when your wifi is connected, but your wifi was only connected 14%... So what was happening with your signal for the other 86%?
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Tasker turns on my wifi at 8:01 am, which would explain why the wifi was on for 1 h and 4 min (9:05 am - 8:01 am).
I assume that No Data Connection is for 7 hours and 46 min out of 7 hours and 48 min because before 8:01 am I had the phone on 2G and Data Off. Then Tasker re-enabled Data and Wifi, and I suppose that before the phone connected to the Wifi, those couple minutes passed by. After those couple minutes, the phone connected to the wifi, thus stopping to use the Data connection once again.
The No or Unknown signal is also a consequence of this. I get that when I'm using a 2G connection with Data OFF.
tylerdurden83 said:
Tasker turns on my wifi at 8:01 am, which would explain why they wifi was on for 1 h and 4 min (9:05 am - 8:01 am).
I assume that No Data Connection is for 7 hours and 46 min out of 7 hours and 48 min because before 8:01 am I had the phone on 2G and Data Off. Then Tasker re-enabled Data and Wifi, and I suppose that before the phone connected to the Wifi, those couple minutes passed by. After those couple minutes, the phone connected to the wifi, thus stopping to use the Data connection once again.
The No or Unknown signal is also a consequence of this. I get that when I'm using a 2G connection with Data OFF.
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Oh OK...
Perhaps run the phone in safe mode and see what happens? Chances are it's an app not properly updated to 5.0 yet...
EddyOS said:
Perhaps run the phone in safe mode and see what happens? Chances are it's an app not properly updated to 5.0 yet...
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It could, but between the stock battery monitor and 3 extra apps (BBS, GSAM and Wakelock Detector) how could it go "unnoticed"?
Noone else has had a similar drain?
Im at about 60% today snce taking my phone off at 7am. Have not done ANYTHING with it though since Im at work. Dont know why this is this low as on KK it would be at around 80.
My battery says its mainly chrome but I havent even been using chrome since I work behind a computer...... odd
tevil said:
Im at about 60% today snce taking my phone off at 7am. Have not done ANYTHING with it though since Im at work. Dont know why this is this low as on KK it would be at around 80.
My battery says its mainly chrome but I havent even been using chrome since I work behind a computer...... odd
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chrome runs background syncing, and lately a lot of people have complaining about its battery drain, check on android police, comments on posts about chrome and you see a fest of people complaining about battery
opssemnik said:
chrome runs background syncing, and lately a lot of people have complaining about its battery drain, check on android police, comments on posts about chrome and you see a fest of people complaining about battery
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Click to collapse
Anyone have ways to stop i t from syncing until maybe you open it?
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Free mobile app
You can try to disable background data for chrome in data usage.
uronfire said:
You can try to disable background data for chrome in data usage.
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But with the consequence of failed download if set chrome in background. So you must set chrome in foreground when download a file.

[Q]Why would I get worse battery life when my signal is better?

I've noticed that when I leave my phone idle at work, it will drain about 2% an hour even though my signal is stronger (usually around -95 dB). At home, I have a fairly weak LTE signal (usually -100 to -105), but my device will not drain nearly as quickly when idle.
I've been sitting at my desk for the last 3 hours, with maybe 2 or 3 minutes of SoT and it's gone from 90% down to 84%. At home, I'd see about 1-2% drop in the same amount of time.
Are there any engineers out there who would know why this thing would happen? Is it because the phone is switching back and forth between different towers?
This didn't happen with my G3 as the behaviour and battery drain was consistent amongst the two locations.
Do you use wifi when at home and not at work?
flu13 said:
Do you use wifi when at home and not at work?
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I'm an idiot. This is probably it. I'll leave wifi off tonight to make sure.
Though, this now leads me to another question - Is the S6 really that bad when on LTE? As I mentioned in my prior post, my G3 did not drain this much and I didn't use wifi at work with that one either.

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