Observations on battery life - please share your experiences

alan_g · 4 Dec 2018, 10:08

And it seems that we're not the only ones to see this:

asked Aug 17 '18
Hi,

I am using sailfish X, on xperia X device.

Once in a while, I notice that my device gets hot, and its battery drains quickly. top shows that this is due do ofonod process, run by user radio.

https://together.jolla.com/question/188336/ofonod-process-takes-up-100-cpu-until-i-reboot-my-device/

Mic_ · 4 Dec 2018, 16:26

As I already said I have this problem on my Nexus 5, which is still also loosing a lot of power in stand-by-mode (but I haven't updated phone bios until now!). But I do not have this problem on my BQ E5, which is regarding energy management phenomenal!

But I can remember some versions from canonical at the end of 2015, where my BQ E5 had a comparable behaviour of charge levels as the graph of @alan_g shows. At that time some days later a new version came and this problem was not existing anymore. Don't know if that helps here.

malditobastardo · 5 Dec 2018, 11:17

Edge channel this started to happen to me also from the last 1-2 weeks

tomoqv · 7 Dec 2018, 13:17

I went back to OPO as my daily driver a few days ago. It has been while since I used it daily as I have had Pro 5 as my main device for some time.

Now, with the OPO on the devel channel, I can conclude that battery performance is pretty poor. Today, I took it off the charger (fully charged) at 06:40am, have done a couple of phone calls and some e-mailing with Dekko. That aside, very light use. I have all radios enabled (and bluetooth connected to my Pebble smartwatch), but have mostly been on WiFi. At 12:40, the battery was down to 40%, which equals an average hourly drain of 10%. That is considerably worse than my Pro 5 under similar conditions.

Mic_ · 29 Jan 2019, 13:15

Since the last release channel update on my Nexus 5 last week the energy management of the phone seems to be improved. So I changed my BQ E5 to Nexus 5 as daily used phone.

I installed a fresh ubuntu touch system on the Nexus 5 (again release channel, Nexus 5 has newest bios installed). Than I tried to recalibrate the accu - discharged it completely in bootloader mode and recharged it to 100% until the green signs changed to white. Than I turned off everything (WLAN, bluetooth, mobile data, location):

After 9 hours in standby (without turning on) the phone discharged from 100% to 63%. In the same time my BQ E5 discharges from 100% to 99%.

Actually everything else on my Nexus 5 is really working very fine and I love this phone. But it is still loosing so much energy power while I am not using it that this is still a knock-out argument for this beautiful phone / ubuntu system combination! What the hell it is doing all the time while laying around?

alan_g · 29 Jan 2019, 13:52

@mic_ said in Observations on battery life - please share your experiences:

After 9 hours in standby (without turning on) the phone dicharged from 100% to 63%. In the same time my BQ E5 discharges from 100% to 98%.
Actually everything else on my Nexus 5 is really working very fine and I love this phone. But it is still loosing so much energy power while I am not using it that this is still a knock-out argument for this beautiful phone / ubuntu system combination! What the hell it is doing all the time while laying around?

I've seen it do that too. But, more often, I've seen it hold charge better and be around 90% after the night. (Still not great I agree, but tolerable.) On these occasions I've not seen anything suspicious running top, but that doesn't really tell what was happening when the screen was off.

I have a long running suspicion that the radio hardware is not always in the state the software believes it to be in. In this case, that "off" shown by the software isn't actually "off". This could explain both battery life problems, and also the flakiness of hotspot. (I'm not sure how to go about proving that idea.)

Mic_ · 29 Jan 2019, 14:07

That would explain why results are so different.

E.g. I was wondering why location service on Nexus 5 after a restart was on and 'fully white' (which is not always the case after a restart!?) - without using the service. This was never the case on the BQ E5.

And I also had the situation that after a night of 9 hours the Nexus 5 only discharged from 44% to 35%. Here I tried to turn off WLAN too (because I am turning off the router in the night and maybe searching a WLAN signal could be one disfunction). That helped. But the next try was worser again.

The discharging in the night from 100% to 63% was shown as a continuous line on the accu graph.

kugiigi · 29 Jan 2019, 14:38

I never got good battery consumption on my Nexus 5 but that could be also because of the battery itself.
There was something mentioned about bluetooth that causes it. There was a workaround to kill it in exchange of the bluetooth. I'm not sure though if it still applies to xenial because IIRC, I read somewhere that it was already fixed.

Mic_ · 29 Jan 2019, 14:49

Here it is clearly not caused by my (new) battery. There are services running in standby which on BQ E5 are turned off. I always have turned off bluetooth - but maybe it is only shown as off. Maybe depending on different situations after a restart?

Mic_ · 29 Jan 2019, 15:58

And a further example: When I press start buttom in standby mode the BQ E5 needs mayby one full second to be ready - while Nexus 5 is much faster. And there seems to be something like a 'deep sleep'. When BQ E5 is a long time in standby it needs much longer to be ready. This is not the case on the Nexus 5.

Mic_ · 2 Jan 2019, 15:44

After installing release channel update-version 32 on Nexus 5 the energy management of the phone improved a lot! When I turn off everything (WLAN, bluetooth, mobile data, location) after 9 hours in standby (without turning on) the phone discharged about 13%. The same happened next day again. This is not good but tolerable and the phone works fine so.

When I press start buttom in standby mode the Nexus 5 needs now a longer time to get ready (maybe half a second). But I cannot recognize a 'deep sleep' - after a long time in standby.

L-00011 · 2 Dec 2019, 18:55

This post is deleted!

tommiedom · 12 Feb 2019, 19:07

@jezek said in Observations on battery life - please share your experiences:

As I wrote in another thread:

I have the same experience on FP2 with OTA3 (15.04).
If wifi is on, there is a huge battery drain (~36% in 12 hours).
If wifi is off, the battery drain is much lower (~6% in 12 hours).

So, on FP2 (OTA3) with minimum usage and

wifi off - something above a week (~ 7 days)

wifi on - something above one day (~ 1 day)

Note: I was a while on OTA5, the battery drain was like on OTA3
Note2: Mobile data off

On my previous BQE5HD with original Canonical UT, the operational time with wifi on (and mobile data on) was about 4-5 days.

Edit: typos
Edit2: updated details on mobile data

Same experience with my FP2

jezek · 13 Feb 2019, 22:02

I think, battery duration got slightly better on FP2.

Last observation on 2019-W06 resulted in battery drain 21% in 15 hours (~17% in 12 hours) with Wifi on, mobile data & bt off and no usage (conditions as my previous tests).

This is worse than on android, but 2x better, than last year OTAs. Good work, keep it up. (y) Sooner or later battery usage will be as good as on android.

arubislander · 13 Feb 2019, 22:09

I changed the scaling on my PRO 5 from 21 to 15 with UTTT. Since then I have noticed a marked increase in battery life. Has anyone else experienced anything similar?

elastic · 14 Feb 2019, 11:14

Under normal circumstances my Nexus 5 is loosing 2%/hr in flight mode and display off
This morning however, it had lost about 70% in 7 hrs ... it might have been the location service as the icon still has been white when I woke the display ... I had a bad network reception when I opened the clock app before going to bed to switch on the alarm and I think it started searching for the location for the time zone and kept searching even after switching to flight mode ..
So it might very well be related to not recognizing the network status on the Nexus 5 and so not stop searching and scanning ...

SirBilly · 27 Feb 2019, 04:38

So about two weeks ago my phone started to have battery life problems.

Would go from full charge to dead in a few hours. So I purchased a replacement battery thinking that would solve the issue. Sadly it has not helped. My last full charge was two and a half hours ago and I'm down to 18% left. In that time I used the browser for maybe 20 minutes and made one call that lasted 5-6 minutes the rest of the time the phone was not in use.

Anyone have some pointers? or tricks I can try?

I was getting 14-16 hours of moderate use a day before this started to happen.

Phone: Nexus 5
OS: (OTA-7) stable
Kernel: 3.4.0-cyanogenmod-g266fa0

arubislander · 27 Feb 2019, 06:58

Can you think of anything that changed those two weeks ago? Did you install Anbox, for instance?

SirBilly · 27 Feb 2019, 15:59

@arubislander I did install Anbox, on the 12th as I needed to use a ticket app to get in to a concert. At the time I also had the Dekko 2 app, and on the Friday after turning the phone back on the app was gone. So I reinstalled the OS using the installer with the full wipe box checked on Saturday hoping that would help with the battery. I installed the new battery on Monday. Right now I'm down 33% from full charge in one hour.

Lakotaubp · 27 Feb 2019, 17:39

@SirBilly Not saying it isn't, but is the new battery good quality. There was someone a few months ago having the same problem and it turned out the 'New' battery wsan't as good as they thought. Just an idea.