Battery "warm" and drains fast until reboot

[Lyrl]

My Samsung Aviator is about two years old.
When I unplug my phone in the morning from the charger (every morning starting about three weeks ago), the battery temperature starts to increase and the battery drains at a very fast rate (generally, dead five hours after a full charge).
If I reboot the phone, sometimes the temperature will drop and the battery will start draining at a more normal rate.

I have bluetooth turned off, wi-fi only active when plugged in, and there are no active apps. I hardly use the phone.

It also seems to be sensitive to air temperature - when I go home in the afternoon (in a car that is, at first, hot), it starts the "fast drain" thing again.

Is this an issue that replacing the battery might fix? Any other suggestions?

 

[mikedt]

Might not be a battery problem, when a battery is getting warm and draining rapidly, is something in the device that's doing it usually. Have you tried resetting the phone to factory defaults, just in case it's only the software or a wayward app that's acting funky.

 

[Crashdamage]

Shouldn't need a factory reset to fix this. Go to Settings > Battery to see what's drawing too much power.

 

[Lyrl]

Yeah, I've scoured everything under Settings->About Phone->Battery repeatedly over several days. It shows exactly the same stuff (display, cell standby, phone idle, android system, Google Services), in the same ratios, when it's draining normally as when it's sucking down battery. I downloaded a wakelock app to see if anything was waking it up - nope. The GSAM app I took the screenshot from also monitors when the display is on, and nothing is turning the display on (besides me, to check the battery status, because I'm paranoid about it now).

I guess I'll try the factory reset.

 

[Lyrl]

I hadn't realized that a factory reset would require contacting our carrier to reactivate the phone - and that only my boss could do this as it's a company phone and activation requires access to the account information. And they reinstalled all the bloatware I'd rooted my phone to get rid of. So the activation was a hassle, and now it needs to be rerooted.

And, it didn't help the battery problem. I did not add any apps, so it's still in "factory condition". And the battery still goes into "fast-drain" mode whenever I get into my car (presumably due to the temperature; it has also gone into "fast-drain" mode until a reboot if I've used it for more than a few minutes at a time, presumably because this also increases the battery temperature).

I guess I'll see if my boss will go for a new battery.

 

[Lyrl]

So, the new battery didn't help either. Factory reset didn't help, new battery didn't help - which leaves maybe a short circuit inside the phone itself? But why does a reboot help then? I'm confused.

I've been trying to pay attention to the time/circumstances when it starts the fast-drain in the morning, and it doesn't seem related to temperature - so something about having recently come off the charger seems to be one trigger (although if it gets hot later in the day, that is also a trigger). Rebooting immediately after unplugging from the charger doesn't help, either - something is triggering 20-30 minutes later to start it eating charge.

I'm going to try downloading a reboot scheduler app (one called "Auto Reboot" looks promising) and seeing if just rebooting it shortly after the time it normally starts fast-draining will be a workaround.

 

[nickdalzell]

it's not your battery that's getting warm, it's your CPU. you have a wakelock issue or an app that's not allowing the device to go into deep sleep.

On Samsung devices, they also tend to have a horridly done radio, so if you're in a signal area of one or two bars, you'll notice often 'Cell Standby' taking up most of your battery. on the Note series they seemed to have fixed that but on older (S2, S3, S4) and cheaper devices (Aviator, Precedent, Proclaim, etc) they have not. most of the time 5-8 hours is all you'll get even if it spends all its time in your pocket.

Samsung products also have failure-prone MicroSD slots, so Media Scanner goes into an infinite loop many a time, resulting in a warm phone, fast battery drain, and even lockscreens that refuse to respond to touch if an SD card is installed. i've noticed that the issue is cureable if you can get it to respond enough (often by triggering S-Voice because the lockscreen absolutely won't respond to touch in such a case many times) to open 'task manager' and hit 'clear memory'. this clears caches and kills all active apps, and should only be used when the device is laggy or unresponsive and it will fix it often. the last time my Note 3 hanged and it was Zooper Pro consuming over 200MB of RAM even without it being used.

 

[Lyrl]

it's not your battery that's getting warm, it's your CPU. you have a wakelock issue or an app that's not allowing the device to go into deep sleep.

As I said before, I've monitored wake times and they are no different when the battery is draining normally vs. super-rapid battery drain. I've used both the app monitoring that comes with the phone and downloaded third party app monitoring software and no unexpected apps are running or wakelocking and app activity does not record any differently during normal drain vs. rapid drain periods. I factory reset the phone and left it in the factory reset condition for a couple of days - and saw the exact same behavior. It's difficult for me to believe, after investigating and finding this result, that it's anything to do with an app.

On Samsung devices, they also tend to have a horridly done radio, so if you're in a signal area of one or two bars, you'll notice often 'Cell Standby' taking up most of your battery. on the Note series they seemed to have fixed that but on older (S2, S3, S4) and cheaper devices (Aviator, Precedent, Proclaim, etc) they have not. most of the time 5-8 hours is all you'll get even if it spends all its time in your pocket.

My signal is four bars, I have not changed the geographic location I spend time in, and I've had this phone for two years and this problem only started a month ago.

Samsung products also have failure-prone MicroSD slots, so Media Scanner goes into an infinite loop many a time, resulting in a warm phone, fast battery drain, and even lockscreens that refuse to respond to touch if an SD card is installed. i've noticed that the issue is cureable if you can get it to respond enough (often by triggering S-Voice because the lockscreen absolutely won't respond to touch in such a case many times) to open 'task manager' and hit 'clear memory'. this clears caches and kills all active apps, and should only be used when the device is laggy or unresponsive and it will fix it often. the last time my Note 3 hanged and it was Zooper Pro consuming over 200MB of RAM even without it being used.

Some kind of hardware failure seems plausible, and a MicroSD slot failure would fit the bill. I've had very few problems with responsiveness, and actually don't remember any issues with responsiveness since I started having the battery drain issue. I have tried clearing the memory through task manager (RAM is always nearly full, even shortly after reboot, and clearing it doesn't change that) to no effect.

Maybe I'll try taking the SD card out and see if that helps (though the way my phone is set up I think that will prevent me from taking any pictures, which is something I use a couple times a week - at least if it helps I'll know what's going on).