"Find My" is draining my battery even though I have turned it off.

I'm happy to report that after erasing and resetting my iPad and restoring from an iCloud backup (turning off location services right from the setup) that "Find My" is no longer showing up in my battery usage by app. The price paid was a magazine app that apparently is no longer available on the app store, a reminder of the unexpected consequences that inevitably occur with restores. Another hiccup was that my VPN was blocking my apps from downloading, but this wasn't the obvious culprit until I dug into my settings (the VPN app itself hadn't even been re-downloaded yet). I'm cautiously optimistic that this solves the problem at this point, the entire restore and setup procedure over several hours with the screen on most of the time took less than 20% in battery life and nothing else seems out of the ordinary on that front. Thanks for the advice.

Thank you for the suggestion. My iPad is set to use my iPhone as "my location", if I switch it to the iPad then that also becomes the location on my iPhone, since the latter is always with me I think keeping my location as the iPhone makes the most sense.

So far I have been seeing much improved battery life by turning off Proton VPN. Find My is still 100% of the battery usage overnight (I simply turned it back on since having it off didn't seem to make a difference) though based on the bar graph the energy use isn't significant, I only noticed 1-2% drain overnight vs. 10%+ before I turned off the VPN. I'll probably have to work with Proton VPN support to see if I can narrow down the problem. It's strange though because the VPN rarely showed as a significant source of battery activity if at all, it looks like there is some kind of interplay between the VPN and Find My, but I think the VPN is the real culprit for the battery drain. Regardless, even when Find My is turned off everywhere, it still shows up as being active in the Battery app. I might try deleting the VPN profile entirely from the device to see if that does anything.

Unfortunately it seems like there are factors at play that aren't obvious at all. The biggest improvement to my battery life came from turning off Proton VPN. It's not ideal to do so but I can't be spending more time charging my iPad than using it, it wasn't showing up as a major battery activity item but it was. I haven't gotten around to contacting their tech support yet. Another gremlin that I had no idea about is the Apple Pencil which might cause significant battery drain if left constantly attached to the iPad. Apparently this was a big problem when it was first released but it could still be an ongoing issue for some, I've seen improvement by keeping it off my iPad, it doesn't show up at all in the battery app. Even though the Find My is showing 100% activity, the battery usage doesn't seem to be very significant, although it's unacceptable that it's in use at all when it's supposed to be turned off or if it's removed from location services.

You'd expect an OS version to be at its most stable towards the end of its cycle, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. The cynic in me thinks these bugs aren't being addressed to push people towards iOS/iPad OS 15 in a few months.

I disconnected my airtag from iCloud and the Find My issue went away. It’s a defective product that Apple apparently doesn’t want to fix.

Unfortunately, it looks like I spoke too soon, like an ugly gremlin Find My has reappeared in my battery activity list. In the span of 2 hours last night it went from 6% to 54% to 100% of battery activity while the iPad was inactive. It took the battery down from 100% to 95% in about 5 hours while the iPad was asleep. Having done a full restore I am at a loss for what else to do besides take my iPad in to the Apple Store (I am still covered by AppleCare for over a year) or install the iPad OS 15 public beta once it is available in the hope that it fixes this. Waiting for 3 months until the new OS is officially released is too long to wait with an issue like this.

Coincidentally, Find My is also the bulk of my battery usage overnight on my iPhone X. The battery needs to be replaced since it is down to 83% capacity, but just last night it dropped from a 100% charge to 81%, primarily from Find My being active at night. The only band-aid I've found for this problem is turning on airplane mode when the iPad is not in use, though this isn't a viable option for my iPhone.

My only other thought is that Proton VPN is triggering Find My somehow. I will try turning it off to see what happens and possibly resetting all settings on both devices.