IPhone XS battery drain

GMac11 · 11 Jan 2021 at 13:24

Hi folks, some help/insight required.

I bought a ‘refurbished’ xs for my mum last week for her birthday this week. I set the phone up on Thursday and it pretty much sat in the box since. I wanted to show my brother yesterday and when I opened it up the battery was totally dead. Thought it was odd but charged it again nonetheless. Again since yesterday (5pm) it has gone from 100% to 40% just sitting on my desk.
There is no SIM in it although it is connected to wifi. I have checked the battery stats and nothing is showing as using the battery out of the ordinary yet there is a steady and consistent decline on the graph.
The battery health is 100% so I thought it should be ok but is it possible even though it says 100% it is far from it?

I do have a returns period so is there something I’m doing wrong or should I just return now and have done with it?

Thanks.

FreeStream · 11 Jan 2021 at 13:46

It is an unusual use case, it may be that without a SIM card the WiFi is on all the time and doesn't drop into a Sleep/low power mode. :confused:

Charge it up and put it in Airplane mode with WiFi off (do it in settings not via control centre).

I wouldn't currently say there is a problem though, it might have just happened to do an overnight update which uses a few % of battery!

The battery health meter is generally reliable, if it said something like 90% then I might get suspicious.

Alpherah · 11 Jan 2021 at 15:20

Third party batteries are usually programmed to always report 100% but can be absolutely naff.

also a poor display repair can damage PWMC which leads to battery drain also

Feek · 11 Jan 2021 at 16:00

Alpherah said:
Third party batteries are usually programmed to always report 100% but can be absolutely naff.

I'd heard a rumour about this before but wasn't sure it was actually true about them always reporting 100%.

GMac11 said:
I bought a ‘refurbished’ xs for my mum last week for her birthday this week.

Refurbished by who?

shiver · 11 Jan 2021 at 16:07

Is it restoring from a backup? Downloading photo library?

wedrum · 11 Jan 2021 at 16:08

New battery from the likes of replacebase.

Sorted.

GMac11 · 11 Jan 2021 at 16:27

Thanks all for the replies.

FreeStream said:
Charge it up and put it in Airplane mode with WiFi off (do it in settings not via control centre).

This is Plan A. I will charge this evening when I get home and see how that goes.

wedrum said:
New battery from the likes of replacebase.

This was one of my first thoughts.

shiver said:
Is it restoring from a backup? Downloading photo library?

Not restoring anything. I initially signed into my own Apple account for the initial setup to inspect the phone and I made sure to turn all the restore features off. Even at that there’s very little on mine. My own iPhone 12 didn’t have any issues.

Feek said:
Refurbished by who?

It was a Marketplace purchase on Amazon. Sold as refurbished and presumably by the company I bought it from.
I allow for issues such as this and made sure it was a Prime eligible purchase etc so I should have no issue with a return.

Feek · 11 Jan 2021 at 16:51

GMac11 said:
It was a Marketplace purchase on Amazon. Sold as refurbished and presumably by the company I bought it from.

I take that as 'cleaned with an IPA soaked rag, reset and put in the box'

GMac11 · 11 Jan 2021 at 17:10

Feek said:
I take that as 'cleaned with an IPA soaked rag, reset and put in the box'

Not beyond the bounds of possibility! I’ve never bought refurbished through Amazon before but I’ve heard some horror stories about the quality control. That being said to buy a second hand unit with 3 years of wear on the battery isn’t ideal either.
That’s the problem when your remit is get an iPhone (explicitly NOT the SE) for £400 or less...