Help Decreasing battery life since purchase

[benawhile]

Hi


After purchasing my Moto G three months ago I found that with extremely minimal use, wifi off, background data restricted, screen dimmed, 30 sec timout, I could get a week between charges but this is now down to 60 hours.


I have made only 15mins of voice calls during 75% battery discharge and this accounts for 9% of battery use.


Could the cause of this be that the battery has deteriorated? If so I will take the phone back under warranty. One thing I have concluded from most forum posts is that with hindsight I should not have allowed the Li ion battery to discharge to zero. I should point out that there is no guidance about this provided in the Moto G guide nor by the sellers. In fact in the Motorola forum there are several posts advising to discharge to zero and then to fully charge as a recalibration fix. Would you advise me to risk trying this at all? Is it OK to charge from about 20% to maximum?


I haven't yet tried disabling apps because Android system is only 7% and Android OS use only 2%. of total battery usage but is it possible apps or services are draining battery without showing up in the stats?


For example in the ″running″ list there are about 12 apps but there are about 150 apps in the ″All″ list and all have a force stop option, which implies to me that they are running, so why aren't they included in the ″running″ list?

 

[Rukbat]

Two things they don't tell you about batteries when you buy a phone:

Charge it when it reaches 40%-60% charge. That gives it the longest lifespan.

Condition it before normal use. Don't even let them set the phone up with the battery you're going to use in it. First fully charge the battery (with the phone off) until the phone tells you that the battery is fully charged. Then use it without charging it until the phone tells you to charge it. Do that 3 times. Then start charging at 40%-60%. (I have an 11 year old phone with the original battery and it works fine. Not many features, of course, they were just starting to put cameras in phones back then, but the battery is still good.)

One discharge until the phone shuts off, and you have to condition the battery again - and you've cut its lifespan a little.

It's like buying a car. Did any dealer ever explain to you what happens if you don't rotate your tires? Or if you over- or under-inflate them? With a car, someone works on it every once in a while. With a phone you're left on your own. And if you kill it after one year, you're still paying for it for another year, but you either pay them to fix it or you buy another one - and people put up with that.

The information is all over the web - it's in many posts on this forum. But no one bothers to look, they just charge the phone when their schedule calls for it, and drain every last drop out of it. That's like not filling the gas tank when it's below a quarter of a tank, but when it's convenient - whether it takes half a gallon or you run out of gas.

 

[benawhile]

Thanks Rukbat, I consider myself told.
So would you say that I now need to condition my own battery the way you describe, as I have let it down to zero a couple of times recently?
I have been picking up more information consistent with what you told me from scouring the forums recently but there is still confusing advice, some actually in the Motorola forum.

 

[benawhile]

I have now gone through two successive discharge and charge cycles (discharged to 20 and 40%) and would be interested in any comments on the following two observaions:
Although at least one web source says I should power off the phone during a recal charge, I was unable to do this. I powered down the phone but as soon as I connected the charging lead, it powered up again.

The battery charge level indicator is now stuck at 100% after 2 hrs use, same fault as reported by other people, although this has never happened to me before. I powered down to see if that would change anything, but since I powered up again I found that the indicator was still stuck at 100% and moreover the "time on battery " had reset to the most recent power up time, so that instead of the graph indicating the time since the last charge, it only indicated time and battery level since last power up.

 

[otacon239]

As far as the phone powering up right after turning it off, I've experienced this. I figured since there was no reboot option in the menu, the default behavior was to reboot if power was connected and turn off if it wasn't. Try turning it off with the phone unplugged and if it won't turn off then, you most likely have a defective handset.

 

[benawhile]

Ah, I can turn it off with the cable disconnected, but that's no use as I want to charge it after I have turned it off. When I plug in the charge lead it comes on again.

 

[otacon239]

It should torn on to the battery charging logo. If it boots up completely when you plug in the cable, there's definitely something wrong.

 

[Rukbat]

Correct. The battery logo is just a charge indicator, it's not the phone powering up. If it does that you're fine. If it power completely up (to the normal lock screen), the phone is defective.

It really doesn't matter, though (other than I wouldn't keep a defective pphone), as long as the charger supplies (and the phone accepts - tw totally different things) enough current to charge the battery while the phone is on. Some do, some don't.

What bothers me is that the "since last charge" changes without a charge. There's something physically wrong there.

Reconditioning the battery is done for only one reason. If the phone sits on a shelf too long between the time it's made and the time you get it (and not even the phone manufacturer has any control over that), you need to condition the battery. It's a chemical thing. (Don't ask me to explain it, I barely passed high school chem - but it was explained to me by one of the engineers I worked with who did understand the chemistry.) It won't fix constantly discharging the battery to almost 0. That damages the battery and it's just going to die younger than it should.

But if it still won't show "since last charge" as the same time whether you turn the phone off and on a few times, if it's under warranty I'd return it. Something is causing the power system inthe phone to think that turn8ing it off or turning it on is charging it. And if it really powers itself fully up to the lock screen when you plug it in (you can always manually turn it off) That's definitely cause for replacement.

(I've recently gone to wireless charging and when I'm on a forum I leave the phone on and on the charger, so I have access to the phone to look and get the wording for some deep down menu choice. When I put the phone, with the screen off, on the charger, the screen comes on. I just press the power switch to turn it ogg. [Thes creen eats a lot of battery, slowing the charging process.] Once it's fully charged I don't bother. The charging circuit in the phone is off anyway, so it's just to keep the phone charged after I pick it up to check something.)

 

[benawhile]

Update. The phone powering up whenever I plug in the power was happening when I used a spare charger I had bought from Amazon, it looked identical to the original. I switched to using the original today and plugging that in does not cause power up. I see the battery charge logo only. Over the last 40 hours since last charge the charge level has now gradually gone down to 91% which is feasible for my usage level.

However the charge time still resets to zero with every power up. (Is a power up the same as a reboot, like a computer?)
But I'm puzzled as to what it should do here. Something has to cause the time since last charge to reset otherwise you would have a graph that shows battery level over the entire life of the phone. On mine it resets both on power off-on and on plugging in the charger. (the motorola one). I accept that I don't need both these to cause a reset, but some charging graphs I have seen on screenshots on forums display spikes of charge and discharge, so they are obviously not resetting with every charge, unless maybe they use an app that enables display over a set time period.

I have 8 months warranty left on the phone, purchased from phones4u, whom I assume are reputable, and the charge graph resetting is not a particular problem, but I will monitor all this and when I am more sure what is right and what isn't I will return the phone if you suggest.

 

[benawhile]

AS a postscript, my last charge lasted a full week. Only used 4% in last 24 hrs. Problem now solved after the recal charges, (did NOT discharge to zero, went down to about 20%) and cache clear.