Extreme WiFi battery drain

[Shadowdancer123]

My phone has been showing extreme wifi power usage since day one.
It has the same percentage as the screen most of the time. 10-15% drain at most.
It seems to level off and not extreme-drain after a while.
No clue as to why.

And here's the kicker; it's not turned on!

I know location services can be set to enable wifi in the background, this is disabled.
And the high power usage remains even when location is forced to "device only"
The Wifi is set to sleep when screen is off, although I don't see how that would change anything as it's turned off.

It has no correlation with signal strength, as some have suggested on other phones.
Resetting WiFi settings fixed it for a day, until I logged on to a WiFi again.

There's no strange activity when I enable "overlay cpu usage"

So I'm stumped. Restarting it works sometimes, but this isn't Windows XP...

 

[mamatt500]

Hello I have the same probleme with my moto z ....Even without using the wifi I use a higher screen
I hope that an update will correct this

 

[flaviosp]

mine is turned on and it drains the same as you describe.

 

[juliospinoza]

I read several blogs and the problem is that the OS is taking a bad reading about the wifi battery consumption, meaning that this is a "bug", not that the wifi is really draining your battery. I made a few test by myself; first, the Wifi is the second place on battery stats, just below screen time, so I decided to charge the phone to 100% and use it as normal with wifi turn-off all day long, using only 4G/LTE signal and the battery was worse than using wifi signals, and surprise, the Wifi was second place again, not even using once on a that day. The second day I charged the phone 100% again and leave it unplugged over the night (12am to 6 am) with all connections on, and the battery drain was only 2%, pretty good in my opinion, and for the first time that day the wifi was the number one on the battery stats, using like 50maH at that time, if you make the math is not even possible, if the baterry is 2500ma and was 2% stand-by meaning that the 50mah consumption were only the wifi??? what about stand by, or sleeping???.
Today, my battery is 40% left and the wifi is number 1 again and STO is second, with 2 hours and 15 minutes and the wifi 10 hours on. As I said, I read several blogs and I am pretty sure is a bug, because I dont see that the wifi is really draining my battery.

 

[Shadowdancer123]

The thing is my phone is running hot in my pocket, and no other application is using power according to the list.

BUT, I actually found a solution.
It's the Smart Lock, I had it set to use my location as a "never lock" area.
This setting apparently started the wifi continuously.
I entered Smart lock settings, deleted all entries and boom; WiFi doesn't even make the battery list any more. It's sub 1%.

And my phone is no longer scalding hot in my pocket either.

 

[juliospinoza]

The thing is my phone is running hot in my pocket, and no other application is using power according to the list.

BUT, I actually found a solution.
It's the Smart Lock, I had it set to use my location as a "never lock" area.
This setting apparently started the wifi continuously.
I entered Smart lock settings, deleted all entries and boom; WiFi doesn't even make the battery list any more. It's sub 1%.

And my phone is no longer scalding hot in my pocket either.

Ok, you are right, the wi-fi is indeed draining to much battery, but after serveral configurations I found the right one, even you can use the "Smart lock" with out problem at all

You can check it here
http://forum.xda-developers.com/moto-z/help/extreme-wifi-battery-drain-solution-t3476579

 

[Shadowdancer123]

That's settings I run most of the time, but for me it disappeared entirely with the smart lock location..
However, now there's a weird ghost drain, the phone will drop 20-25% in 4-5 hours with an absolute minimum of active use.

The phone is room temperature, so nothing appears to use any exorbitant amount of CPU like before.

And there's no obvious power hog in statistics either. :S
There's got to be some kind of bug with the CPU power down mode or something.. Not sure how I'm going to track it down.

 

[Shadowdancer123]

Com.android.systemui is the only process in CPU stats.
But it shows 9.0 usage in all three rows.
Is that process using 90% CPU?

 

[PiousInquisitor]

@Shadowdancer123 install Wakelock Detector Lite from the Play Store. Then follow the instructions in the Play Store app description on how to use it with a non rooted phone. When you are done running it you should know what the drain is from.

Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk

 

[Shadowdancer123]

So I finally received my USB type C cable so I could connect to my computer and install wakelock lite.

Found several guilty apps, two games which I'd installed but forgot about, that ran a lot in the background.

But biggest hog was an app called e-control for my broadcom wireless gadget, it had woken the CPU 4000 times in 3 ½ hours.

There's obviously a bug with battery stats, as none of these were visible there.
Or it only counts apps in foreground which is kind of pointless, as I already know my games eat battery...

Now when I leave the phone unplugged at night, after a full charge, expected battery life is 3-4 days in the morning.
Which is still terrible, but realistic.

 

[macknet]

Turn off location permission on google chrome Settings > Apps > google chrome... change permissions.. that is what fixed it for me.

Went from 20-27% wifi battery drain down to 5%.

 

[elliehirschberg]

Turn off location permission on google chrome Settings > Apps > google chrome... change permissions.. that is what fixed it for me.

Went from 20-27% wifi battery drain down to 5%.

did it report at chrome or did it report as WiFi?

 

[orbitz52]

May wifi is always on but no WIFI usage in battery..? plenty of bugs. I just bought this last week.

Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk

 

[macknet]

did it report at chrome or did it report as WiFi?

It reported the battery usage as Wi-Fi in both the system battery UI and GSAM Battery monitor.

 

[jeromejeremytay]

Hi all, I'm still on the old firmware with July Android security patch update. I still get the false wifi reading after trying all the methods suggested here.

 

[juliospinoza]

Hi all, I'm still on the old firmware with July Android security patch update. I still get the false wifi reading after trying all the methods suggested here.

Here is the solution. So far so good
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3476579

It reported the battery usage as Wi-Fi in both the system battery UI and GSAM Battery monitor.

May wifi is always on but no WIFI usage in battery..? plenty of bugs. I just bought this last week.

Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk

Sent from my XT1650 using XDA-Developers mobile app