Ways to Reduce the Battery Drainage on an iPhone.

By Glenda V. Such, M. Ed.: Suchasite1@gmail.com

 

Suchasite.com a part of Such Technologies

 

For those of you who have an iPhone or know someone else who does, this may be of some interest. I put this list together on what to do to reduce the drainage on the iPhone battery. If you know of any other ways to decrease the drainage on the battery, please let me know.

 

Let me be honest and give the bad news first. Using Hey Siri drains the battery of the iPhone significantly because it is always searching for your voice to call Hey Siri and for you to ask your question or give your command. . If you are willing to give up the hands free aspect of Siri, You can still use it by using the manual way.  This would be just like we did prior to iPhone 6s.

 

The bad news doesn't stop there with the use of Siri.  Whether Siri is used by Hey Siri or by the manual way, each time Siri  is used   it drains the battery significantly. I dread saying that because I am a person who uses Hey Siri and Siri manually all the time. But, I do so with the knowledge I am using battery life to ask it questions or to do things I can do myself, that is, if I was not a Siri addict. Therefore, go ahead and use either Hey Siri or Siri manually but do so with the understanding you are using your battery significantly.

 

Next, be aware of the temperature where you are using or storing the iPhone. While anything above 95 degrees Fahrenheit or 35 degrees Celsius could cause the iPhone to overheat and shut down, temperatures below 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 degrees Celsius will drain your battery. This is not to say the momentary time when running from the house to the car in freezing weather will drain it a great deal, but rather standing outside waiting for public transportation or going for walks in the snow if a definite no, no, if you want to limit what drains your iPhones battery. You ask how to handle this; one suggestion is to keep your phone in a pocket under your coat where it can get heat from your body. Other ways could be to keep it in some form of insulated case. But, not too small of a case, just one to protect the phone from the winter chill., Get creative in ways to protect your iPhone from doing something worse than catching a cold. Find ways to keep it healthy and not losing its battery charge.  

 

I recently learned of another  part of the iPhone's basic features  which drains the battery. This one truly surprised me. It is the level of the volume. If the volume is high then the battery drains a little faster. However, if you are dependent upon hearing the iPhone to use it, like I do because I use Voice Over screen reader, then this might be a difficult piece to reduce to save on your battery drainage.

 

With that said, let’s go into the other parts of the iPhone where the battery is being drained:

1.          In the main page of settings, go to Notifications. Go through the list down the page and turn off all that you can live without. This is the biggest drain on battery because it is searching for things to notify you about continuously. I am sad to say as of yet, you have to turn them off one by one.  To make it worse, after you turn off notifications on one app, it takes you all the way back to the beginning of the entire list of apps you have on your phone. Then you have to go to down the entire list of apps you already fixed in order to get to the next one on the list. Sorry about that long and tedious process.

2.          Go back to main page of settings and then to sounds or sounds and haptics dependent upon your iPhone model. Go to each event listed, such as new voicemail, calendar alerts, new mail, and so on. Where ever possible, turn off the vibration portion of the way you are alerted to the event. You will find that possible by going into the Sound and Haptics page or sounds page for older iPhones, then to each event. Where it reads Vibration and then the word default or some other patter name, go into that option to make the change. The selection to no longer have it vibrate on that event, such as a calendar alert or new email, is at the bottom and reads the word none. Be aware, if you plan on using the reminder feature to help with finding a location, then do not turn off vibration. For an explanation of what I am speaking about for using reminders for alerting you in your navigations, see my webpage, suchasite.com and look at the iPhone page of my site and see the work around for haptic signals for navigating.

3.          Go back to main page of settings and then to display and brightness and turn it to at least less than 50 percent. The more under that the more you save.

4.          Then in the same part of the display settings, look lower down on that screen and find Auto Lock and decide if you can reduce the time the screen is awake and using power. It is talking about when your iPhone is left unattended, this is a huge power drain as well.

5.          While still in that page of settings, turn off Auto Brightness as that is a battery draining feature but is not worth what you lose.

6.                Turn off raise to wake because it also drains power and when set to the off position, you only have to tap the home button to wake your iPhone up, the tradeoff is worth the effort.

7.          Go back to main Settings page and to Cellular. Then look at what is on. You have to wait a minute while it compiles a current up to date read out of usage. The list down lower on this page gives each app and its use of cellular data if you are not on WIFI. While this might not seem relevant for you, take a look at what apps have been using data time. Go through the list of apps and turn them off if you don’t need them to work if you aren’t on WIFI. You are doing this because when they are set to the on option, they can start looking for data sources even when you are not using that app. I shut down a great deal of my apps and my battery showed the difference the first day of the changes.

8.            Go back to main settings page and go to Battery and then to location services. Go in and turn off what you don’t need. Then go to the bottom of the list to system services and go to each app and service and turn off what you feel you don’t absolutely need. The items you don’t want to turn off, the best thing is to select the option that will limit the battery drainage and that is to choose the option, allow while using the app. That makes it stop using battery unless you are using that app like maps, WAYS, and so on.

9.          While still in the location services and the system services part of settings, you can select to do the following:

a.      leave on cell network search

b.        leave compass on

c.     Leave emergency calls and SOS on

d.    Absolutely Leave Find My iPhone on

e.     Unless you have an iPhone operated smart home, turn this one off

f.      Location based alerts leave on

g.    Turn off location-based Apple ads.

h.    Turn off location-based suggestions

i.       Leave Motion Calibration and Distance on

j.       Leave setting time zone on

k.     If you are not sharing your location with anyone turn that off but if you are, leave it on

l.       Leave WIFI calling on

m.   Leave WIFI Networking on

n.    Turnoff significant locations as that is apple watching you to see what ads they can send you.

o.    Turn off iPhone analytics

p.    Turn off popular near me.

q.    Turn off routing and traffic

r.       Turn off popular near me.

s.      turn off location-based suggestions. It would scare you to see what Apple knows about your travels.

10.     Go back to the settings main page and then to general: then go to Air Drop and turn it off unless you are always sharing with others using this feature. When it is on, it is searching for people to send and receive to all the time and thus draining your battery.

11.     While you are on the same main page of general, turn off hand off unless your using an iPad or iPod a lot of the time.

12.     Stay in general and go to accessibility: go down to reduce motion and turn that “ON” and the animations of the icons for the apps will just act regular and save you battery life.

13.     While you are Still under accessibility, turn reachability off as there is no reason to have that take any power.

14.     Go back to the General page and then go down to background app refresh. Turn it “OFF” because there is no need for this. When it is on, it is always having your apps refresh even when they are not running. Don’t worry when you turn this off because when you open any app, it will refresh itself then and that is all you need.

15.     Go back to the setting main page and Turn off WIFI if you are not using it If it is on and not being used, it is searching for a WIFI connection. However, if you are in a place that has WIFI which you are setup to access, go ahead and leave WIFI on. Be aware, you should turn WIFI off in setting not just by turning it off in the Control Panel. It is not always fully off by doing it that way.

16.     While still in the settings main page: Turn off Bluetooth if you are not actually using it. Don’t just turn it off in control panel because it is not truly fully off that way.

17.     Go out of Settings and into Control Panel. If using voice over, go to the status bar and when you are on one of the status readouts, such as the battery status or time, slide three fingers up the screen from the bottom. Then flick left to right to get down to flashlight and flick down until you hear open controls.  Then double tap with one finger and then double tap with one finger on flashlight off. Then flick down to the option of either normal or dim. The lesser setting will of course use less batteries. Then you can come out of this by quickly drawing a small letter Z with two fingers anywhere on the screen. For all other users, go to the flashlight option in control panel, then put your finger on the control part of the flashlight and tap on either the normal or dim option.  For both voice over users and other users, this will reduce the battery usage of the flashlight which drains the battery a great deal when on bright or very bright. If it is not bright enough in the future, do these steps and return it to the setting you prefer.

Now when back on the home page of the iPhone, swipe the iPhone screen from left to right to reveal widgets. Get rid of any you don’t really need. They use battery life many times even when they are not actively open Note, if you are using voice over you have to swipe three fingers from left to right to get to the page numbered zero. Then when you go down the list you will find the word edit. When you double tap on that, you can go through the items and when you want to remove one, flick down until it says “remove” and then double tap to remove that widget. By the way, a widget is a quick way to get important information from certain apps like weather, stocks, news, your calendar, and so on.

 

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