topic Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better? in X Series

Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

alex_ncfc — Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:02:48 GMT

I've had my Xperia X Compact for 2 weeks now and I have had the Battery Care setting enabled, which apparently charges until 90% and then starts to charge slowly as to preserve the battery's life. I noticed that it was a week or so before I started to get a "Battery care" notification when I plugged in my charger at night, which I guess is because it needs to do its homework to see when you would usually charge your phone.

At first this all made sense, I would plug in my charger at around 11-1130PM at night (as I usually do before bed) and the Battery Care notification would say something like "Battery care enabled, phone is expected to be fully charged by 8AM) But it's getting stupid now, I put my phone on charge at midnight last night and it said it would be expected to be at 100% by 18:30 tonight!! And sure enough when I got up this morning, despite being plugged in all night, my phone was sat at 90% battery charge. So what exactly is happening, why would it want 18 hours to get to 100% now using Battery Care whereas when I first started using it, it would be a normal and acceptable 8AM until fully charged?

Not sure if I've been doing something wrong, does anybode else use it?

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Qatrium — Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:57:22 GMT

Battery Care will learn your wake up time as long as you use your phone, so it will leave the last 10% of charge to be charged just before you are supposed to wake up. If it detects your wake up time wrongly, then just give it more time and it will learn it eventually.

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Kroma — Sat, 19 Nov 2016 18:35:21 GMT

Be grateful

I've had mine for 3 weeks and I don't think Battery Care has kicked in at all! How do you get it to start doing its job?

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

alex_ncfc — Sun, 20 Nov 2016 12:33:22 GMT

Thanks for the reply, Quester.

Kroma, obviously first off make sure Battery Care is enabled in the "Power and battery" settings screen, which I am sure it probably already is. For the first week or so I didn't notice anything and so I wasn't even aware that there was any form of Battery Care notification, I assumed it was just 'doing its thing'. But I charge the phone around the same time each night, and eventually I started getting a notificaiton that Battery Care was in operation, so it has to learn when you would usually charge your phone. It says something in settings along the lines of, Battery Care will not run if you charge your phone always at different times, so if you charge your phone at around the same time each day/night then it should start kicking in. When it does come up, there is an option to tap the notification and revert to "standard charging".

As I said above, mine seems to have lost the plot a bit, again I plugged it in around 11:30PM last night and it said it wouldn't be charged until 12:30 today! So when I woke up this morning it was still on 90% and I tapped the notification so it would charge normally to 100%, and unbelievably after 4 hours since taken off charge it is still on 100%.

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Philh9000 — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 22:53:29 GMT

Is the battery care active when the phone is charging switched off?

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Kroma — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 10:47:01 GMT

Thanks for your helpful information. It still hasn't kicked in for me though. Rather than hijack your thread I'll continue at my original thread at http://talk.sonymobile.com/t5/Xperia-X-Compact/Qnovo-adaptive-charging/m-p/1175731#M303

Thanks again,

Kroma

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

alex_ncfc — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 13:55:12 GMT

Still finding "battery care" incredibly patchy and random.

Some nights it will come up when I put the charger in, others it won't

Also some times when it does kick in, it will go from one extreme to the other: it will tell me in the notification that it will be fully charged by maybe 7am in the morning...or as I said in a previous post, as late as 8pm the next night!!

I like it when it does work, because it means by the time I unplug the charger lead, it hasn't been sat at 100% for long. But it doesn't work consistently enough.

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Kroma — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 14:26:47 GMT

Mine has still never kicked in even though I am pretty consistent with my charging patterns. No messages have ever appeared. I've tried to see if it's actually running in the background. I see that 'Battery Care' isn't in the 'not optimised' list - would that affect it? Should it be in the 'optimised' list?

When I got my phone, I performed a factory reset after a couple of hours as I wanted to start setup from scratch. Would that have caused Battery Care to become dormant?

I'm seriously considering connecting the charger to a timer plug so that it only charges from 4.45-6.45am as the phone is all ready to go at 2am! That's 6 weeks of overcharging now.

Kroma

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

alex_ncfc — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 14:31:31 GMT

I would say that a factory reset soon after you got the phone shouldn't have caused an issue, in fact I think I did a factory reset soon after my first set-up to start again. I am wondering if you have inadvertently pressed on the initial notification which means it doesn't come up again at least I think - I still have not pressed this, so every time battery care does kick in, it comes up with a message explaining what battery care is, and how long it expects to be before the device is charged to 100% - it mentions something like 'pressing this notifcation will not show it again in future' - maybe that's what has happened??

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Kroma — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 15:41:42 GMT

I've had a look at the Battery Care app settings. I see that the setting to allow notifications from the app during 'priority mode' is off (I assume by default). As my phone is already automatically in priority only mode when I start charging, I wonder if this is keeping the required message from showing? I've changed the setting now. Let's see if I have more success this week!

Kroma

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

alex_ncfc — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 22:36:48 GMT

Any luck yet Kroma?

I'm back again just to ask Sony because as you know, I had Battery Care problems initially, but then it worked fine - and now it suddenly isn't kicking in again like at the start!! I am guessing that if you just happen to plug your charger in at some sort of wrong time (as in, getting the timing wrong) then it will reset your Battery Care parameters, and the phone will have to "learn" all over again about your charging habits.

What I can't understand is why Sony have made it like this - why does it have to learn when you would usually charge? Why can't you set a time period when you would usually put it on charge, it just charges up to 90% every single night I charge it and then goes upto 100% in the early hours.

It's a frustating feature, when I got the phone this was actually one of my most looked-forward to features (a bit sad I know) because I was hoping it would make my battery last longer, and initially it did, and I was getting 3 days easily, but if you look at my other thread today, I was down to 35% tonight from 100% this morning. Not good enough for a phone that I have only had for a month!

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Kroma — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 00:05:37 GMT

I'm afraid I've had no luck - thanks for asking.

I've tried to be as consistent as possible with my charging habits but to no avail.

I too was looking forward to using this feature to possibly double the life of my phone (which I think is great in all other respects).

Over the last 3 days I have taken to not charging my phone when I go to bed but I then plug it in as soon as I wake up and unplug it again when I go to work. It's usually somewhere between 80 and 90% by then and still manages to last until I wake up the next day.

I'm off work for Christmas now so am likely to have less consistent sleeping hours so it would be even less likely to kick in if I go for an overnight charge yet again.

I am tempted to plug the charger into a timer so that it starts charging at about 5.15am when I'm back at work. That way it should be at 100% by the time I leave the house but that kind of defeats the object.

The best thing for me would be as you mention to be able to tell it when to reach a full charge because I know when I'll be unplugging it. Maybe Sony will read these messages and allow such customisation?

I don't think my battery capacity has been harmed (yet) by not having the feature kick in but it's only a matter of time.

Let me know if you have any further success.

Kroma

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Kroma — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 07:05:01 GMT

It's kicked in!!!

6 weeks of plugging my phone in at 11.30pm and unplugging at 7.45am... nothing.

5 days of plugging in at 6.15am and unplugging at 7.45am (9.30am yesterday)... nothing.

Then, this morning I wake at 6.45am, plug my phone in and for the first time ever battery care kicks in and tells me that my phone will be fully charged at 1.58pm!

1.58pm??? I've never unplugged my phone at that time. But at least it's active now.

I'll click on the notification at about 8.30am so that it reverts to normal charging.

I might even revert to overnight charging for a while now to see if I can retrain it.

So, it does work but needs some work as it's not very intelligent. An option to change the time that it gets to 100% would be good. Being able to manually start the feature would be even better.

I'll keep you posted.

Kroma

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Kroma — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 23:46:06 GMT

Even better news. I've just plugged my phone in at 11.35pm (I decided to go back to overnight charging to try to train Battery Care into seeing my normal charging pattern) and battery care kicked in again. My phone will be at 100% by 8.07am. That's good news. It looks like it goes more by total charging time than by start/finish time.
If it continues like this when I return to work (when I need a full charge by 7.45am), then selecting the normal charge option at 7am should see me charged and ready to go in time.

I'm still not sure why it took 7 weeks to kick in but I'm glad it has.

Thanks for your help and advice everybody.

Kroma

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

alex_ncfc — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 11:22:12 GMT

Thanks for the updates Kroma.

I am now in the position you were in before - Battery Care is not activating at all, and it is very frustrating.

I now have to leave my phone on an overnight charge, where it will probably be sat at 100% charge fully not long after I put it on charge and be like that for 5 or more hours (I've never understood why Sony phones don't stop charging when they reach 100%?)

I've even made a point of plugging my phone in to charge at around 10-11PM every night for the last 5 or 6 days, but nothing happens.

I think the thing that is annoying me most now is how quickly battery life has deterioated since I purchased this phone. What is yours like just out of interest? Just 4 weeks or so ago, I could easily be still in the 80s % by the end of the day. Now I will be down to 30-40, which means I have to put it on charge to have enough power to cover the next day, whereas before, I didn't have to!

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Kroma — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 08:52:32 GMT

Hi.

My battery seems ok. Some days I have 60%+ left and other days 15% (usually when I'm out and about so I put a lot of that down to weak mobile signals plus my car puts my phone into WiFi Hotspot mode). I do tend to use it quite heavily at times.

Last night I decided to charge overnight again (even though I could have probably made it last another day but I want to keep training it now that Battery Care is working). I plugged it in at 23.45 and Battery Care kicked in and told me that it would be at 100% by 15:47. Wow - I've never unplugged it at that time. That's twice my usual plugged-in time.

Anyway, I woke at 6.45am (when it was at 90% as expected) and pressed the notification to switch to normal charging. It was ready at 100% just after 7.30am and I unplugged it. Let's hope that I haven't stopped Battery Care from working now!

Kroma

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

Fizz_daz — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 19:32:22 GMT

Since the nougat update my battery struggles to last 24 hours where as before I could easily go 3 days without a charge. Battery care does not activate for. Me either since the update. I only ever plug it in over night as well. This update has really messed my power usage up.

Re: Can someone explain Battery Care charging better?

alex_ncfc — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 12:09:35 GMT

Scoobyfizz, I've also noticed that since updating to Nougat 7.0 that my battery only lasts around 24 hours now also, and this is not with heavy use.

But my biggest gripe is still with battery care - it has not activated for me now since some time in November, despite me consistently charging at the same times. It's got to the point now where I charge my phone and wait for it to get to 100% and take it off charge myself. Sony, why advertise a feature when it clearly doesn't work? Can't remember the last time I saw battery care kick in!