Hey Robert:
1.) Please tell us the result of your spinning test! Is the battery bloated`? If yes --> see here!
2.) If negative, did you already try the Battery reset, as stated above and here in another form form the battery wiki:
Use the battery up until it is below 0% (until the phone dies).
Take the battery out of the phone.
Plug your charger into the phone (still without battery). [Wait a few minutes]
Insert your battery. (This will give the battery a kick)
Charge your phone in one go until 100%. Do not boot the phone during charging.
If this doesn’t work for the first time, try it a second time, beginning from step 1
Your battery should charge with the original charger (1A) about 2h from 0%–>100%!
What are your results?
imho these three things are signs for an old battery that is about to die. The capacity and thus charging time varies because the voltage becomes unreliable. Restarting the phone forces it to guess the actual charge in the battery. Although I don’t own a FP yet that’s my experience with my dying Samsung phone and other Li-Ion-battery devices
I experienced the same kind of problems. The spinning test revealed nothing ; by the way the bloating problem does not correspond to age. it’s only related to overheating. And I haven’t tried the whole draining plus recharging thing. So I can’t tell you.
I’ve been having those sort of issues for about 2 or 3 month. But did not complain (even if I have to say it’s kind of slowly worsening) because all in alI keep an average of more than 1d8h of autonomy, even going up to 1d20h sometimes. This is not dependant on my wifi or data usage.
I have to say though, the behaviour is more erratic sometimes I experience more like a jump from 60% to 25% sometime smaller, when I performed the spinning test it went from 75% to 49 %, I had brutal drops to 1% and then one or two hours before reaching 0, and I even had the contrary : my phone was off charging for about an hour only to go from 7%to 9% and then I decided to turn it on and brutally appeared at 65%. I experienced that last one two or three times.
But in the end I’m not mad, I just think the battery is getting a bit old. Though I would’ve expect it to last maybe 4 more months .
It’s not really less than announced, As I posted on the french speaking Facebook group. If you have a look at figure 5 of this article https://www.fairphone.com/2015/01/22/first-fairphones-environmental-impact/
We’re coming to the end of the announced lifespan of our batteries and should expect replacing them around january.
@Jonathan_Bondu: I would highly recommend to give the “Battery Software Reset” a try, because this is exatly the (temporarly) solution for your described problems!
So please: try it once (or twice) and report back if you could improve it a little!!
After 2 years usage, I am far away from having a dying battery because it still lasts 3-4 days for my average usage, while I try from time to time the Battery Reset, which is by the way no big deal!
Some more points about this:
Battery drops appear repeatedly at FP (also after doing the Battery Reset) if you
put battery off the phone and back in
if you switch your phone off and on frequently
if you switch of your phone with a low level (<20-30%)
If your battery usage is not limited to only 20-80% but also involves from time to time 0-100%
So you shoud avoid these points in general, but mor important escpecially after doing a Battery Reset to keep a good battery health for a longer time.
After each of the above scenarios a “BatteryReset” should give you a quite more accurate Battery calibration and thus the possibility to just use more of its capacity, which otherwise just is not recognised by the Fairphone-Software!
But in very serious cases, you could also have a dying, while aged battery, but I think it should be only your conclusion, after you first tried the points above!
I just tried to do a battery software reset. and as you say, and it seems pretty legit to do that.
I am impress that you caan hold for 3 4 days. But I think I use a good bunch af battery intensive apps.so that may explain the difference.
Anyway, I’ll do other battery reste in the future, at least up till my battery’s average drop under a day.
I also have another problem, my clock battery must be dead. So that’s annoying. but unless it has other consequences than just having a clock that resets when I take off the battery, I won’t send my phone for repair I think. Because apparently for this kind of issue you have to change the whole motherboard. and apparenttly it’s not bothering me enough to justify this big a repair.
Nice that you think it helps. Can you later nail it down to some numbers? (like before: 1d8h / after: 2d5h or similar)
3-4 days (sometimes 5) with most of the time dual-sim@2G, mostly no data connection, only some SMS, calls, browsing WiFi.
clock-battery: I read in other threads (1,2), that here it is neccassary to change the clock-battery, which is not that easy. But in my case, the clock sets itself in the same second after I enabled my SIM with the PIN, and no need to adjust it manually!
Cheers, Robert
I have made a test over more than 24 hours, trying to use the FP at minimum (no Wifi, no internet, only phone and messages, plus some small local applications). The battery went down smoothly and normally from 100% to around 60% in about 24 hours, and the phone was working perfectly. Suddenly yesterday afternoon the phone was completely stuck and I was obliged to reboot it (no other way). After rebooting, the battery level was at about 18% (so it dropped in few minutes from 60 to 18%). I decided not to recharge it immediately and observed its behavior, it was again working perfectly and the battery discharge went back to normal, it lost about 3-5% in 2-3 hours. I’ll attach a screenshot of the battery level of yesterday between 00h00 and around 22h00 which clearly shows the abrupt drop at around 18h00.
I am still skeptical… Is it the batttery or any internal software or hardware problem ? If it is the battery, why did its behavior start again to be normal with 18% charge after reboot.
If soemone has the answer… would be helpful.
Good work!
I tend it is only a battery software problem.
FP battery is known to have problems acquiring the correct charging level after reboots (esp. unwanted).
Therefore I decided only to send my FP to FlightMode during night instead of shutting it down and struggeling with wrong charging levels…
did you make the battery-reset already before this test? If not - go ahead to make it and again watcht to the battery consumption over the next hours (days) and provide a screenshot.
your battery voltage is 3,694V for 18% level. I will check at home, if I noted also a voltage for 18% level, than we can compare [I will edit here]
what is about your other problem, concerning the WiFi?
I guess, if you would continue using the FP starting from 18% - it will be stuck at 14/15% for several hours and afterwards running down till 0% within minutes, as this is the behaviour a lot of FP users reported (incl. me).
But with the battery reset und avoiding FP reboots with a low battery level I do not run in this problem within the last months [I will add later some comments on this in the [battery wiki\]
]1
I would say one should better write: “so it dropped from 60 to 18% triggered by an unwanted reboot” since it most likely has nothing to do with the “few minutes”.
Cheers, Robert
Edit1: From the battery test you can check some voltages for your FP battery, e.g. after a “full” charge it should have about 4.1V, 50% should have about 3.8V. Yours 18% with ~3,7V could be quite realistic…
I would recommend to make the battery reset test and afterwards note down every 10% your batter voltage and check if you are approx. at the voltage curve posted below (considering “Time/min” in first approximation as “capacity/%”, although it is most likely not linear.) Just for a first guess, if it seems OK or if we already here see a bloating battery (are there any voltage curve for this available?)
Actually I still see this behaviour as the first symptoms of a bloating battery… It started like this with my own (first) battery and subsequently it started swelling.
Just in case you haven’t done so already, instructions on what to do are here.
Also, please stop using the battery, the swelling is a sign of physical failure and a swollen battery can be dangerous, even more so when in use/being charged. See the linked help desk article for proper disposal procedures.
When I first wrote about the problem, it had been so for about 2-3 weeks, so it was a month ago.
The bloated battery emerged continous, no special date.
Now I don’t dare use the phone anymore,
Sorry, I had important personnal problems and couldn’t take the time to deal with my Fairphone issues.
The thing is, even if i disable the wifi (settings> SIM management > Wi-Fi OFF) the phone connects to wi-fi when it finds some.
The battery spin test is negative.
I’m trying to drain the battery and charge it as indicated in post 2 tonight.
