Battery Problems (After Bricking??)

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xSTUDDSx

Member
Jan 28, 2014
12
1
Alright so I've been doing research online this week and haven't been able to fix it so I'm coming to you guys. I'll give you a little background to hopefully help speed up this process.

So about 3 weeks ago I rooted my Sprint LG Optimus G after having it for almost a year to get some better performance and battery life out of it. After getting it all setup, I noticed a huge difference and was even able to watch the movie Flight and two episodes of Family Guy off Netflix and my battery still lasted 9 hours that day.

Well last weekend after uninstalling some Google apps I soft bricked my phone. Thanks to the help of sawdey21 on the IRC I was able to get it back up and running with LGNPST. After getting it running, I switched launchers (from Holo to Nova) and also unlocked mine phone via FreeGee with TWRP. Since then, my battery life has been terrible. To give you a reference it took my phone 8 hours to fully charge last night while it was off (although since I unlocked it I have a new charging animation and after a few seconds of the animation, instead of shutting the screen off like it use to it now just goes to a black screen but is still on as you can see the brightness. It never shuts off). After unplugging it, an hourly later I was down almost 15% after just listening to music and after 4.5 hrs its at 30% and I just plugged it in. Today I have done nothing but listen to music and just period check/browse my phone.

Is it possible that the bricking messed up my battery? Or the unlock? I switched back to the previous Holo launcher I was using before and it made no difference. I've also unistalled several apps I downloaded since the bricking I thought could be causing it.

Has anyone ran into this or could help? My next step is to boot back into Download Mode and try LGNPST again. I would post pics of Battery Settings, WakeLocker and BetterBatteryStats but I can't since I'm a new comer.

Thanks!
 

I-IoLLoW

Senior Member
Oct 1, 2013
1,243
1,547
Pittsburgh
Alright so I've been doing research online this week and haven't been able to fix it so I'm coming to you guys. I'll give you a little background to hopefully help speed up this process.

So about 3 weeks ago I rooted my Sprint LG Optimus G after having it for almost a year to get some better performance and battery life out of it. After getting it all setup, I noticed a huge difference and was even able to watch the movie Flight and two episodes of Family Guy off Netflix and my battery still lasted 9 hours that day.

Well last weekend after uninstalling some Google apps I soft bricked my phone. Thanks to the help of sawdey21 on the IRC I was able to get it back up and running with LGNPST. After getting it running, I switched launchers (from Holo to Nova) and also unlocked mine phone via FreeGee with TWRP. Since then, my battery life has been terrible. To give you a reference it took my phone 8 hours to fully charge last night while it was off (although since I unlocked it I have a new charging animation and after a few seconds of the animation, instead of shutting the screen off like it use to it now just goes to a black screen but is still on as you can see the brightness. It never shuts off). After unplugging it, an hourly later I was down almost 15% after just listening to music and after 4.5 hrs its at 30% and I just plugged it in. Today I have done nothing but listen to music and just period check/browse my phone.

Is it possible that the bricking messed up my battery? Or the unlock? I switched back to the previous Holo launcher I was using before and it made no difference. I've also unistalled several apps I downloaded since the bricking I thought could be causing it.

Has anyone ran into this or could help? My next step is to boot back into Download Mode and try LGNPST again. I would post pics of Battery Settings, WakeLocker and BetterBatteryStats but I can't since I'm a new comer.

Thanks!

I'm not 100% sure but it is possible the bricking messed with the battery. LGNPSTing back to stock could have affected it, anytime you flash a new rom it takes a couple of days to "settle in" but you said last weekend so it should be settled by now.

But from your info, it may be the way you are charging it. There is a common misconception that every so often you are supposed to let your battery drain fully and then charge to 100%. This is only true for nickel based batteries, ours is lithium so this is in fact quite detrimental. Lithium batteries are built to be charged often and you should never let it dip too far into the red. Doing so decreases the life and performance of your battery significantly. 5% is as low as I'll let my battery dip before charging and even that is pushing it imo. There is an app in the play store called battery calibration that actually tells you to do this, but like I said, it's only useful for nickel based rechargeable batteries. Also this same app's function is deleting the batterystats.bin file in order to "recalibrate" the battery. This is also completely false as that file has nothing to do with how well your battery performs.

I wouldn't turn the phone off to charge, just charge it while it's still on so the screen actually shuts off. Checking your wakelocks and using greenify on power hungry apps will go a long way. I also turn my capacitive buttons off because I don't need to see them to know left, right, center and what they do. And if I'm not using it, it is always off, sync, gps, brightness when inside, etc. But as I said, it may have been the way you were charging it, it might not affect the battery for months, then all of a sudden your battery doesn't perform as well because it's dying due to improper charging techniques. And when you LGNPSTed back to stock, your system tries to start fresh which is why it may have happened immediately afterwards.

I hope some of this helps you - if using greenify doesnt show improvement you may want to buy a bigger capacity battery and start fresh. Installing the new battery is tricky however, there are youtube videos on how to do it, but it may not be for everyone.

Good luck and I'm sorry if I assumed too much or misread your info!

EDIT: You may also want to try flashing a different stock kernel(I use Viper1.1, my signature has a link to the thread) and using trickstermod to undervolt the cpu. The improvement is minimal but every little bit helps. On average I get a full 24 hours in between charges and usually charge once it hits 10-15%. And it only takes about 60-120 minutes to fully charge.
However the lgog is also very fickle, what works for one may not work on another, even if it's the exact same model. Many people have reported the same security bootloop soft brick after deleting google apps for instance, but I deleted(not frozen or disabled) google apps just fine. The only ones I have on my phone are play store and google search and I'm still on stock zvc.
 
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xSTUDDSx

Member
Jan 28, 2014
12
1
HPTesta,

Appreciate the response and all the info. To clarify a little more, I've never installed a custom ROM. Just been doing launchers from the Play Store besides having to do the LGNPST. As far as Apps I've been using greenify since I rooted 3 weeks ago as well as CPU Tuner which had both been doing great for me before this.

As far as charging goes, I generally never run my phone compleley dead. I usually charge when its getting low but last night I ran it complete lay dead to use Wake locker (read in the app store to drain bat, recharge full, and use after a couple hrs.

One thing I did find weird is that I don't remember how much battery I had when I bricked it but after doing the LGNPST I had 0 (Don't know if that's normal).

Also, never used the Battery Calibration app.
 

I-IoLLoW

Senior Member
Oct 1, 2013
1,243
1,547
Pittsburgh
HPTesta,

Appreciate the response and all the info. To clarify a little more, I've never installed a custom ROM. Just been doing launchers from the Play Store besides having to do the LGNPST. As far as Apps I've been using greenify since I rooted 3 weeks ago as well as CPU Tuner which had both been doing great for me before this.

As far as charging goes, I generally never run my phone compleley dead. I usually charge when its getting low but last night I ran it complete lay dead to use Wake locker (read in the app store to drain bat, recharge full, and use after a couple hrs.

One thing I did find weird is that I don't remember how much battery I had when I bricked it but after doing the LGNPST I had 0 (Don't know if that's normal).

Also, never used the Battery Calibration app.

Ok well it seems like you follow good battery techniques. Maybe try LGNPSTing back to a full stock zvc(or zvb and then updating to zvc) and charge it to 100%(let it sit at 100% while still charging for 15 mintues or so) before rerooting and unlocking. I would probably also copy your internal to your pc and wipe everything in recovery before doing LGNPST just to make sure it is a completely clean slate. I added an edit in my post above as well.

I had a strange issue a few weeks back where I tried overclocking my cpu with AK kernel - my battery was at 99%. My phone shut off and wouldn't come back on, just had a red blinking light. I later found out it was an issue with AK. I charged it for a few minutes and luckily was able to get into TWRP. The strange part was that when I did get into TWRP my battery read 0%, I did a full wipe and restored my backup, then my battery read 99% in TWRP. It's a different issue from yours but makes me think that it's possible that your softbrick and LGNPSTing affected it somehow.

---------- Post added at 03:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:49 PM ----------

And based off what your saying would you not recommend doing LGNPOST again?

I honestly have not had or heard of any issues with LGNPST and battery performance. Anytime Ive had to use LGNPST with a full stock .bin, it essentially set my phone back to factory condition, battery performance included. However since this all happened when you did this, maybe try flashing another rom first, even a stock based one and leave LGNPST as a last resort. Just make sure you read the instructions for whatever rom you decide to test and always do a full wipe(data, cache, dalvik and system) before flashing.

EDIT: Sorry if it seems like I gave you conflicting info, if it was me I would probably be weary of using LGNPST again, personally. But if I tried flashing other things, different recoveries, roms and still had the same issue, maybe it was just a slightly messed up LGNPST flash and would try it again as a last resort.
 
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xSTUDDSx

Member
Jan 28, 2014
12
1
Forgive my ignorance but I've never actually booted into twrp recovery. Its volume up and power but where do you go from their to wipe?
 

I-IoLLoW

Senior Member
Oct 1, 2013
1,243
1,547
Pittsburgh
Forgive my ignorance but I've never actually booted into twrp recovery. Its volume up and power but where do you go from their to wipe?

After holding volume up + power, you then will hit volume down twice and power again. Once in TWRP it is very easy, there is an install button, wipe button, etc. Hit the backup button, pick all available options and then do a backup and reboot into your OS. From there, download a rom(optimus DE is a great stock rom) to your internal and you will probably need gapps as well(depends on rom but almost all of them need gapps or you wont even have the play store - just read the install instructions of the rom). Go back into recovery, This is under the advanced wipe button in the wipe menu - wipe everything except internal storage(if you wipe internal you will lose your backup, pictures, music, etc) and then go to install, pick the rom.zip and flash that, then pick the gapps zip and flash that as well.

Also keep in mind that if you flash an AOSP or CM based rom, the file system will be different. Our internal storage is /data/media but for AOSP based it is /data/media/0. So say for instance you make a backup in TWRP of your stock then flash an AOSP rom, it will look as if your internal is gone as well as your backup. You will just have to use a root file explorer to copy the /data/media/TWRP folder to /data/media/0/TWRP and then you will be able to restore your backup from TWRP.

If you are just going to try LGNPST again then when you get into TWRP pick everything including internal and turn the phone off and put the phone into dl mode(you know what you are doing from there).

One final note, if you are using current FreeGee to unlock then you are most likely using the updated TWRP. Some people have had SEVERE issues with it, for others it works just fine. You need it to install any rom based on Android 4.4 but I personally use TWRP 2.5.0.0 which will flash stock to Android 4.3 roms just fine and it is rock solid stable. So unless you are planning on installing a kit kat rom, I would first download the TWRP 2.5.0.0 zip found here to your internal, go into twrp, pick the install button, find the .zip file and install that, then go to reboot in TWRP's main menu and choose recovery instead of system. TWRP should now read 2.5.0.0.

Sorry for the books I'm writing here but I think it's always best to be thorough!! And I haven't slept in about 30 hours so I am a bit scatter brained.
 
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