Screen facing upwards or downwards, or in both cases?
Battery issue FP3
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Excuse me, I think I misspoke.
I could only observe this behavior after using an app and about 1 hour after closing the app.
Within that hour something consumed up to 10% electricity.
During this hour the aircraft mode was activated.
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Hello,
The problem is not systematic. I loaded my phone up to 80% last night and since then it is discharging normally … We can see the difference on the screen.
I will wait for the problem to happen again (every 2-3 days until now) and try in airplane mode.
Béa
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I have noticed that it occurs particularly between a charge level of 80 to 70%.
I put it down earlier at 77%, wlan and mobile data out, and after 1 hour it’s at 70%.
Update:
Yesterday I closed all apps and deactivated Wlan and mobile data.
The smartphone had 77% battery left.
2 1/2 hours later it still had 64%…
I just don’t know why, all apps seem to work normally.
Does the battery need to be calibrated?
The only time my FP3 hammers its battery is when there’s poor signal strength, is that the situation with yourself?
Is the WiFi signal strong enough and the phone is connecting to data and back to the WiFi very regularly?
Is Battery Manager activated? That should show up any apps who are misbehaving.
Is there perhaps an app that’s improperly setup and it’s trying to synchronise data and failing?
Apologies, I’m not able to be of great help. In developer options there’s “take a bug report” which may shed some light?
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The signal strength in my home is always sufficient.
Up to now I had no problems with the Wlan…
The battery manager is activated, but I don’t know if I have to restrict individual apps or not?
Unfortunately there is no app displayed and therefore I don’t know which app it is.
Hello,
I had trouble again that night, in airplane mode. The phone was charged at 53% around midnight, I put it in airplane mode, this morning at 10am it was 18% …
Have a good day!
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I noticed a similar issue on my FP3 but not to the same extend.
The battery usage in standby, over night, with display off is way higher than it should be. It’s about 50% of the usage with screen on and active 4G internet usage while browsing with screen on (which on other phones takes significantly more current than standby), and pretty much unchanged between WIFI off and WIFI on in standby.
To me it looks like some hardware components are not set into their right power safe states when in standby, but I wasn’t able to debug which, since the stock Android 9 has extremely restrictive SELINUX rules with most of the sysfs tree not readable. I couldn’t even access /sys/class/power/battery from an in-app command line shell.
From an adb shell its a tiny bit better but still extremely restricted, but when that is active the phone is powered through USB, so that’s not really suitable to monitor power consumption details.
Edit: over night the phone discharged by 20% in 10 hours, with mobile data turned off and wifi turned off (so no internet), but two SIMs installed and an sd-card installed.
NFC, Bluetooth and all that were turned off.
screenshots: the first dip from 100% to 80% was overnight with wifi and mobile data off. then the phone was charged for a few minutes. after then wire ( app ) was started and either wifi or mobile data enabled all day.
the average drain seems pretty constant, a bit more during active usage with screen on.
This night … stopped charging at 99% in the evening, level was at 98% in the morning after 7 hours, WiFi enabled, Mobile data enabled.
The software is not exactly in stock shape anymore, though, and admittedly that’s an anomaly so far on my phone, too. I’m used to the battery losing 1% to 2% in 3 hours when doing nothing, WiFi and Mobile data enabled.
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In the menu, how big does it say your battery is?
According to the specs, FP3 is supposed to have a 3000mAh battery. The phone itself however claims it has a 2000mAh battery:
( read out with app “CPU Info” from Fdroid )
however in “About Phone” in the settings menu it claims the battery tyype is 3060 mAh.
i dimly remember seeing 2000mAh somewhere else, maybe while browsing sysfs in adb
/sys/class/power_supply/…
After installing AccuBatteryPro (btw is there any open source app with similar functionality out there?) I managed to “measure” the capacity based on integrating over the charging current and got to 3014 mAh (pretty close to the factory 3060)
The driver still claims it’s a 2000 mAh pack, which might cause initial calibration to be bad, so it possibly needs a few more charge/discharge cycles to come to a good calibration than normal.
After a few more loading/unloading cycles, and monitoring the battery utilization with AccuBattery, it looks like deep sleep is indeed working correctly, with the discharge curve in standby almost flat. The only cases where it wasn’t was when I had misbehaving apps drawing a lot of battery. Discord was one of them. Even with Wifi off, it somehow managed to keep the standby current at approximately 2% discharge per hour.
Unfortunately the stock android display to report app battery usage doesn’t do a good estimation on which apps are drawing current while the device is on standby, so in doubt one has to check that with trial and error.
It looks like both Wifi and SIM Cards only draw a surprisingly small amount of power in standby, which is a testament to the quality of components used in the Fairphone. What draws a lot of power in standby though is the CPU if any app keeps it awake when it technically should have gone into deep sleep doing nothing.
It’s surprising that a standard chat app like Discord, which relies on google push services for notification and wakeup and could go to sleep properly draws so much power in background, while at the same time, another chat app, Telegram, which relies on the “notification hack” instead of the “google way” to remain active in background and keep a network connection open, ends up using much less.
PS: I double checked, turning Wifi off alone does not trigger high bat usage. Battery usage is lower with wifi off than on, as long as no apps are running. As it would be expected.
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This is my phone basically lying around at home all day (24 hours since the last complete charge) … alarm activity in the morning, no surfing the web, no calls, some turning the display on and off to just check the battery level 
… WiFi enabled, Mobile data enabled, Location enabled, Discord (not battery-optimized) running continuously.
Edit:
24 hours later … I’m trying to run down the battery some more before charging again to see whether the reported level is plausible (i.e. battery calibration is ok) … about 9 hours of the browser being on all the time, Fairphone community forum browser tab open nonstop like the upstanding, exemplary forum lurker I am (good for JavaScript activity constantly eating the battery I suspect), about 2.5 hours of rather active constant use, about 6.5 hours of rather inactive infrequent short use … and a little SMSing and a little calling. Looking good so far.
Edit:
Another 24 hours later … After watching the battery going down 7% over the course of 14 hours of idling, I ran video streaming for about 6 hours to keep the display busy and see whether something surprising would come up with the battery getting used more, but nope, battery going down nicely linear into energy saving mode, which I set to start at 15%, and that’s when I stopped keeping the display on.
So this awesome battery life seems legit.
Going to charge now.
OsmAnd use was yesterday, so was any Fennec use (but there are 8 additional minutes given here). Funny this didn’t make it into yesterday’s battery usage list. Perhaps Android processes this data at intervals instead of assembling current data every time you bring up this screen?
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Hello,
I waited a few weeks to be sure but the problem seems to have resolved itself. Maybe my battery needed several charge cycles to get calibrated correctly. I did not have this problem after a month of use.
I hope it will continue like this!
Thanks for your help!
Béa
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The problem came back for me, after about 2 months of usage, last night the phone turned off while being on standby - discharged over 50% in only 34 hours without any usage, data and wifi turned off.
According to Accubattery the phone spent most of the time in deep sleep, yet it used up over 1600 mAh of juice while doing nothing.
That’s averaging on 48 mA drain current in deep sleep. Way too much!
The battery is well calibrated by now and the charging data from Accubattery is consistent, so I can rule out both bad calibration and the battery is definitely still good.
(Accubattery’s estimates are consistently between 2900 and 3000 mAh total charge averaging on 2966 mAh capacity)
Something drained the battery while the phone was supposedly in standby/deep sleep.
And its not happening always, I didn’t have any of this phantom drain issues for weeks, then suddenly the phone is off in the morning.
I don’t see it yet. Due to the staggered release philosophie it could be weeks before that update gets offered to me, I didn’t get the Oktober update before end of November.
Btw, a after a device reboot (forced, since it had turned itself off at 2% bat), the phone now only uses 15 mA in deep sleep – with wifi ON!
The problem seems intermittent. I don’t know what causes it, although I have a suspicion that its more likely to get triggered with Wifi OFF than ON. I’m going to leave wifi off tonight to verify.
Nope, that wasn’t it. Tonight with Wifi Off, the phone lost only 86mAh in 7.5h averaging at 11 mA power usage. I have no clue what exactly triggers this issue, but it doesn’t seem to be Wifi.
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