How can I prevent my Desire HDs battery from draining overnight?

Question

I've recently got the new HTC Desire HD, which has a poor battery to start with (1230 mAh), but in the last two weeks I've had several nights waking up with a dead battery.

The first few nights, I suspect that wifi was still running and by default the radio didn't go to sleep when it's idle (changed that). I reduced syncing frequencies for most services to once a day, so that can hardly be the problem. When looking at the battery usage reports, it's mostly the huge screen draining the battery, but that's turned off at night. Last night I turned off any data connection and went to bed with 90% battery and woke up with a dead one.

So what on earth is crashing my battery so quickly? Does anyone have any suggestions other than the no-brainers mentioned here.

Answer 1

I'm suggesting an app called PowerTutor (free on the Market). When you turn on the profiler, the app monitors the power usage of each applications and android subsystem, and give a detailed report of what application has been consuming the most battery.

The idea is, you turn the profiler on, then use the phone as usual. Be aware though, the power profiler itself is very power-hungry and it does not save the profiling result if the profiler is restarted, that means if your phone's battery runs out before you can look at the report, you'll just be wasting battery (IOW, you might need to wake up in the middle of the night to look at the report before your phone runs out of battery; or you might need to put the phone on charger, which might affect the result of the profiling since some applications might behave differently when charged and when on battery).

Answer 2

I ended up trying several things mentioned in the XDA-developer thread:

• Changing the Networkmode from GSM / WCDMA Automatic to either GSM or WCDMA, XDA-users claimed that switching between these two modes is a huge battery drainer. In my experience this was the most important one.
• Installing a widget, so I could check whether Bluetooth and GPS were really turned off. Especially GPS could run in the background, after using Google Navigation, without displaying the icon.
• Turn off syncing for apps you don't really use or rate limit updates to a larger interval. You can always update manually and getting new contact info once a day is more than enough!
• Remove widgets that need regular updates, even though the sync setting should have control this.
• As I'm using a HTC Sense phone, I turned off all their proprietary apps, I simply don't trust the power usage of things like Footprints.

If you apply all these settings, you should manage to get a full days worth out of your battery, unless you play too much Angry Birds.

Answer 3

After trying out nearly every battery monitoring app I could find at the time, I ended up installing the free JuiceDefender and it's accompanying commercial licence JuiceDefender Ultimate. I found this was a good tool as it learned my usage habits, and would automatically turn the radios on or off depending on where I was or what I was doing with the phone. Combined with wiping the battery stats and a few recharging tricks, I managed to easily get a day of standby charge.

If you're game to load a custom ROM, you might be able to push the standby out to 2 days at the risk of bricking your phone if the flashing operation fails.

The only other thing that I didn't try is to see if there is a utility that can identify the many service apps running on the phone, and see if there is anything that might be turned off. It's not unusual to have an OS running more services than are strictly necessary, even on a phone.