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I am trying to figure out what is draining battery on my Early-2015 Retina MacBook Pro overnight. I close the lid and leave it in sleep state overnight. The next morning, quite often I find that almost 70-80% of the battery has drained. What is surprising is that on some mornings, I find that only 10-20% of the battery has drained.

I have the same model MacBook Pro at home too. Both have the same issue.

OS: macOS Mojave (10.14.2)

Battery cycle count (or work machine): 217 Battery condition: Normal.

I use an external mechanical keyboard while working, but unplug it before I leave. I do have a USB wireless mouse. The receiver for the mouse remains plugging in, but I turn off the power switch for the mouse.

In energy save preferences, I do not have power nap enabled.

How can I go about finding out what often drains the battery?

Thank you.

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  • Does activity monitor show something ?
    – anki
    Apr 3, 2019 at 11:11
  • @ankiiiiiii Nothing that I can see out of the ordinary. I have my Chrome and other apps open, when I put down the lid and put it to sleep. I resume my work in the morning.
    – ayaz
    Apr 3, 2019 at 14:19
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    LAN connection on normal usage also drains battery faster than wifi. Also, if network sharing is enabled, others users don’t let the Mac sleep. Also look for uploads or some web pages which significantly use power.
    – anki
    Apr 3, 2019 at 15:48

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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If you have "Find My Mac" enabled, macOS will keep persistent TCP connections even when it "sleeps" (not really sleeps then). This draws battery, sometimes a lot. You can check if it is on with terminal:

pmset -g | grep -i tcp

See if you have:

  tcpkeepalive         1

If it is so, you cannot really do much unles you turn off "Find My Mac" (with all risks that it involves).

Also it is possible that something on your mac prevents it from sleeping. Typically you can find it with pmset -g assertions. It will tell you what keeps your mac awake. Mine, for example, is kept awake by bluetooth keyboard and touchpad all the time. Sometimes there are also processes stuck and keeping my mac awake for no reason. Then I just kill them.

In general, you may keep your macbook on power adapter for most of the time despite people telling you that you should not. I had a number of macbooks in my household since 2007 and almost always kept them on power adapter. In the end they were too old or failed for any reason but never due to battery. The worst battery performance I had was about 75%. Most of them were > 80% capacity after several years.

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I had the same issue. To rectify it I ran the following commands in terminal.

pmset -g

To get my current settings. Saved the info from above command somewhere safe if you need to go back for reference.

Then ran the following commands in terminal.

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25
$ sudo pmset -a standbydelaylow 1800
$ sudo pmset -a standbydelayhigh 1800

You can read about these settings here.

You can read about hibernate modes here.

As always proceed with caution when applying these settings. Know what you are doing.

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