Strange battery behavior this weekend

[Hi Ho]

I was camping in a tent this weekend and what has been excellent battery life since the latest update has been aweful. I kept charging the phone using my inverter/wall charger but it would run dead in an hour or two. Today i charged it for an hour while driving and got out of the car with 55% charge. Now exactly an hour later there is only 10% left and i have barely used it. It dropped 20% in ten minutes! Wtf?

 

[harleyless]

your signal while camping was??? most likely the problem with the drain. Doesnt sound like you charged it long enough in the car for a full charge...should be fine once you return to normal signal and a full charge

 

[htmlcssguru]

I was camping in a tent this weekend and what has been excellent battery life since the latest update has been aweful. I kept charging the phone using my inverter/wall charger but it would run dead in an hour or two. Today i charged it for an hour while driving and got out of the car with 55% charge. Now exactly an hour later there is only 10% left and i have barely used it. It dropped 20% in ten minutes! Wtf?

I would say also that the culprit could be you have 'roaming' set to 'On' which, while you're camping, will continually try to find a signal. Usually 'camping' implies you're out in the wilderness and possibly outside normal coverage areas. If so, the phone will go into 'roam' mode and chew up the battery looking for a signal. Check that out.

 

[Hi Ho]

I wasn't camping completely in the sticks. I was at a music festival. I was roaming but I had a solid 5 bars the whole time. I actually had charged it for an hour with the phone OFF before I left so it really had two hours of charge time and only got to 55% when it quickly drained to nothing and shut off just after I typed this post.

When I got back in the car to make the rest of the journey home I put it on the charger and streamed Last.fm for the 2.5 hour trip. The charge never went above 12%. Five minutes from home it said it had stopped charging. I opened the center console where the inverter is stashed and it was HOT! It has never heated up like that while charging a phone. Maybe there's something wrong with that? I turned the inverter off and in the 5 minutes home the phone lost 10% charge and got down to 2% by the time I walked in the door.

 

[kamikazekyle]

I had problems with Last.FM chewing my battery even though it wasn't actually in use. Although my drain wasn't as bad as yours, we're still taking 20-30% per hour with radios enabled even when I wasn't using the phone. It was using system services to transmit data, so it didn't show up as an app using battery. Try uninstalling Last.FM for a day if you're still having problems and see if that fixes the issue.

You inverter was probably pushing out the max the phone can handle. Was the phone hot also? Not sure if the Evo has this (dont' see why not), but some phones will disable charging when they reach a certain thermal threshold. Again, not related to your inverter temp, but something to think about.