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MBP 13" 2015 excessive battery drain in sleep

HiVolt

HiVolt

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Sep 29, 2008
1,902
6,642
Toronto, Canada
I was given given a 2015 13" MBP from a family friend whose husband passed away. I wiped it clean with Internet Recovery and installed a clean macOS Monterey.

Seems like a nicely spec'd unit, a Core i7 with 16GB RAM & 512GB SSD. Seems to work quite nicely despite the aged processor and looks in good shape without any delamination of the coating on the screen.

However I've noticed an interesting "problem". It drains battery quick when the lid is closed, what I assume should be sleep mode. If left fully charged in the evening, it will discharge almost completely by next evening. The battery has 93% capacity and 470-ish something cycles.

The problem is, I don't even know if it's entering sleep mode, since Apple felt necessary to remove the convenient LED that would pulse when a laptop went to sleep or not. The battery preference pane shows a steady decline like if it was being left idle with the screen off. I tried resetting the SMC, it didn't seem to affect it. Power Nap is and was disabled by default. There are no other relevant options I can see. I'm not even logged into iCloud or App store, so its not doing anything in the background, install is clean with only FireFox installed for a browser (sorry I cannot use Safari because of no uBlock Origin support).

I haven't had an Apple laptop since I stopped using my first gen Intel Macbook around 2010, so I don't really know the behaviour of the newer ones. Is this normal, what it's doing? My 2016 Lenovo laptop with similar spec will last well over a week in sleep mode.
 

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You can check the sleep state its using and adjust accordingly. Either a utility or, maybe, pmset -g cap still works. No idea with Monterey.

On any laptop, I use a default schedule to shut down soon after my usual bed time and wake shortly before my usual wake time. Saves me having to think and simple to override when desired.
 
If nothing else works with Monterey...

... have you considered wiping it and re-installing an older version of the OS?
(since you're "starting fresh" anyway)

I'm thinking that 10.14 "Mojave" might do the trick for you.
 
It's not a machine I will be using every day, so I'll just shut it down. But I am just curious why this is happening...

My question is, for anyone with any Macbook, does the battery drain register like that on the graph, even if it drains less? I wish it had an indicator that it was in sleep mode like it has for charging.
 
Fishrrman said:
If nothing else works with Monterey...

... have you considered wiping it and re-installing an older version of the OS?
(since you're "starting fresh" anyway)

I'm thinking that 10.14 "Mojave" might do the trick for you.
Click to expand...
I had the same issue as him and going down to Big Sur didn't help.
 
HiVolt said:
I forgot to get back to this thread... I ended up resetting the SMC & PRAM, and it has been fine. I tested it for a week with sleep, and it only drained like 10%.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately that was the first thing I tried and it didn’t work sadly.
 
The first thing that came to mind.... indexing everything because you did a fresh install. I know this occurs on iPhones regardless of device when upgrading to a newer OS, the phone wants to re-index.
 
Again I'll suggest:
If you're not going to be using this for days -- perhaps even a couple of weeks -- at a time, why not just shut it all the way down?

But... it might be a good idea to put it on charge at least once every 7-15 days, boot it up just to check on things, etc.
 
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Fishrrman said:
Again I'll suggest:
If you're not going to be using this for days -- perhaps even a couple of weeks -- at a time, why not just shut it all the way down?

But... it might be a good idea to put it on charge at least once every 7-15 days, boot it up just to check on things, etc.
Click to expand...
I mean they did advertise a 30 day standby time on sleep so I would at least hope to get at least somewhere within that ballpark.
 
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