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iPhone 5 shutting down with 20% battery life left

My iphone 5 is turning off with 20% battery life showing. I've done all the updates. When I plug it in, battery life immediately jumps to 30% left. Any clues? It's not overheating and usually I'm just typing a text message. It's shut down twice now as I try to send a picture with the message. Thanks in advance for any help.

iPhone 5, iOS 6.1.4

Posted on Sep 4, 2013 7:43 PM

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Posted on Sep 26, 2013 7:49 AM

"

This usually means that your battery gauge needs to be calibrated. Apple actually recommends doing this on a monthly basis, but the advice is buried in the battery info tiphttp://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html.


What you need to do given your current problem: When the phone shuts off and it isn't down around 1%, connect to a charger for just a minute or 2, or wait 15 minutes, then reboot the phone (hold HOME and SLEEP until an Apple logo appears). Continue running the battery down until it shuts off around 1%. If it goes off above that value repeat the above process until you really do get to 1% (this will rarely take more than 2 tries).


Once it has turned off and won't restart or reboot charge it with the wall charger for 4 hours without using the phone. This should fix the problem for the moment. Going forward, about once a month run the battery all the way down and charge for 4 hours. This should prevent the problem from recurring.


If this does not work your battery may be failing. As it's still in warrantly take it to an Apple store for repair."


I am having the same problems with my phone and found this discussion last night and tried to follow this procedure but I could not get my phone to turn on and run down to 1%. It shut itself off from 15%-7% almost instantly. I rebooted it as recommended by others and turned it on and let it shut off until it got down to 7% then it would no longer turn on. even after sitting for a little while. I have charged my phone to full overnight with the charger that it came with and will wait to see if the problem persists. I am very frustrated with this and found out that my phone is a few days outside the 1 year warranty. If anyone has had this situation and found a fix without getting a new phone, please let me know.

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Sep 26, 2013 7:49 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

"

This usually means that your battery gauge needs to be calibrated. Apple actually recommends doing this on a monthly basis, but the advice is buried in the battery info tiphttp://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html.


What you need to do given your current problem: When the phone shuts off and it isn't down around 1%, connect to a charger for just a minute or 2, or wait 15 minutes, then reboot the phone (hold HOME and SLEEP until an Apple logo appears). Continue running the battery down until it shuts off around 1%. If it goes off above that value repeat the above process until you really do get to 1% (this will rarely take more than 2 tries).


Once it has turned off and won't restart or reboot charge it with the wall charger for 4 hours without using the phone. This should fix the problem for the moment. Going forward, about once a month run the battery all the way down and charge for 4 hours. This should prevent the problem from recurring.


If this does not work your battery may be failing. As it's still in warrantly take it to an Apple store for repair."


I am having the same problems with my phone and found this discussion last night and tried to follow this procedure but I could not get my phone to turn on and run down to 1%. It shut itself off from 15%-7% almost instantly. I rebooted it as recommended by others and turned it on and let it shut off until it got down to 7% then it would no longer turn on. even after sitting for a little while. I have charged my phone to full overnight with the charger that it came with and will wait to see if the problem persists. I am very frustrated with this and found out that my phone is a few days outside the 1 year warranty. If anyone has had this situation and found a fix without getting a new phone, please let me know.

Feb 26, 2017 5:34 PM in response to Jules 35

Finally I have found the easiest way to resolve this problem of randomly shutting iPhone at 2 to any percentage. Steps to do


1.When your iPhone randomly switch of then charge it back again to 100% and an hour more.

2.Drain your battery by playing or whatever but don't use iPhone in lower power mode at any percentage even if iPhone says for lower power at 20% then also don't lower the power mode.

3.Now your battery would last 1% before shutting down.

4. Charge again to 100% without doing anything.

5. After charging restart your iPhone.


It's over your battery performs normally now and don't use lower power mode for a long time after20% battery or play while your iPhone is charging this is main cause of the problem. Thnx bye!

Sep 7, 2013 7:12 AM in response to Jules 35

Hey Jules 35,



That definitely sounds frustrating. Let's see if we can isolate the issue further. A great troubleshooting step will be to back up your iPhone (with iCloud or iTunes) and restore as new. If the issue persists, we've isolated it to hardware. If the issue does not persist, you can restore your backup. Here are some helpful articles:


Choosing an iOS backup method (Should I use iTunes or iCloud to back up my iOS device?)

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5262


iTunes: Restoring iOS software

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414


For additional information on battery life, see the following:


Apple - Batteries - iPhone

http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html



Thanks,


Matt M.

Sep 7, 2013 7:20 AM in response to Jules 35

Jules 35 wrote:


My iphone 5 is turning off with 20% battery life showing. I've done all the updates. When I plug it in, battery life immediately jumps to 30% left. Any clues? It's not overheating and usually I'm just typing a text message. It's shut down twice now as I try to send a picture with the message. Thanks in advance for any help.

This usually means that your battery gauge needs to be calibrated. Apple actually recommends doing this on a monthly basis, but the advice is buried in the battery info tip http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html.


What you need to do given your current problem: When the phone shuts off and it isn't down around 1%, connect to a charger for just a minute or 2, or wait 15 minutes, then reboot the phone (hold HOME and SLEEP until an Apple logo appears). Continue running the battery down until it shuts off around 1%. If it goes off above that value repeat the above process until you really do get to 1% (this will rarely take more than 2 tries).


Once it has turned off and won't restart or reboot charge it with the wall charger for 4 hours without using the phone. This should fix the problem for the moment. Going forward, about once a month run the battery all the way down and charge for 4 hours. This should prevent the problem from recurring.


If this does not work your battery may be failing. As it's still in warrantly take it to an Apple store for repair.

Nov 7, 2013 9:19 AM in response to JarrodB

I figured I should update this with a solution to my problem... I ended up buying a replacement battery from Amazon for something like $8.00 (I chose not to spend the $70 from apple) and made sure to fully charge and discharge it for the first few life cycles and it has been working 100% As far as I am concerned there was nothing to lose but more money by going through apple here. My phone is beyond its warrantee.

Sean

Dec 5, 2013 10:45 AM in response to Jules 35

I'd just like to say that ahs70's post on Dec 1, 2013 at 1:17am on Pg. 9 worked for me as well: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5338609?start=120&tstart=0


If your iPhone's battery is acting up you need to determine if it's a software issue or a hardware/battery issue. To do that, after syncing your iPhone, erase/hard reset all data and settings from your iPhone to what it was from the factory as new. This can be found in Settings/General/Reset/Erase All Content and Settings. Then test it out for a day or two. If it's still acting up then it's likely a hardware issue and you will need to get your battery replaced. If your warranty is done than check out this link to get a battery kit to replace your iPhone battery yourself: http://www.ifixit.com/Store/iPhone/iPhone-5-Replacement-Battery/IF118-001#produc tDescription


If your iPhone is now working properly after hard resetting it than it's most likely a software issue. This battery issue only started after upgrading to the new iOs7, so it is obviously related to the update not properly installing itself. What has worked for me and many others is to manually update to iOS 7.0.4 using the full downloaded version of the update which is about 1.32 Gigs.

But first you need to find out what model of iPhone you have, click here to determine if it's GSM or CDMA: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3939?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Then go here and scroll down to download the iOS 7.0.4 complete update for your device: http://www.downloadios7.org/download-ios-7-0-4-ipsw-file.html

Then scroll up on the download page and follow the instructions of updating your iPhone manually following the instructions below: "IPSW with iTunes"

And your done.

Problem solved.

I only posted this because it was a very frustrating problem that no one really seemed to figure out a solution for.

I hope this helps.

Emile Beaulieu

Dec 6, 2013 9:43 PM in response to Slick Pouch

You actually don't need to do a hard reset and erase all your data and settings on your iPhone-this step is to simply determine if it's a software issue or a problem with the battery. You can skip the hard reset step and just manually install the full 1.3gig downloaded version of iOS 7.0.4 on your iPhone with all your data and settings on it already. This should fix it if it's a software issue and this way you can keep all your data and settings without having to start over again and lose everything.

Dec 16, 2013 8:20 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

Thank you for this advice. I've been fighting with this issue (shutting down at 20%) for some time, but only with this encouragement went through with 6 or 7 rounds of "exhausting" the battery before it finally broke through the 9% mark.


Now it's made it down to reporting 1%, and has been running fine at that level for about 20 minutes. Following your advice, I appear to have enabled a new power source within my iPhone.

Dec 17, 2013 12:33 AM in response to Slick Pouch

Slick Pouch:

A "hard reset" is merely a reset by holding the power and home button, until the device shuts off. It does not mean all information will be erased. Perhaps you confused it with putting the device in "recovery mode", which will erase and restore from back-up, or install fresh.



After you drain the battery all the way, try to keep the phone off and do a full charge (for a few hours). Unplug the device, turn the phone back on, do two resets (home+power button). Then use normally, letting it drain all the way down before plugging in again.


From what I remember there is software that tries to guess what percentage the battery is at by usage history. If you use a game, or perform activity that is heavily power-hungry, it will misrepresent the percentage and actually drain more than the device indicates. I think the reason why restores work is because it resets the statistics that the software uses to try and calculate the percentage; however, a faulty battery will be miscalculated over time (unless the OS does diagnostics on the battery cell). Some users think doing the double resets helps re-calibrate those statistics.

Dec 18, 2013 8:06 AM in response to Massie

Lithium Polymer batteries, in general, should be fully discharged and fully charged as much as possible to prolong the battery life.


By not doing so you are using a portion of the battery more frequently than other parts. While the wear-leveling has improved it still is not great. It's kind of like a cat scratching at a piece of wood, if it claws in the same spot it's going to break sooner; but if it spreads its strokes across all the wood, it'll maximize how many times it can clean/trim it's nails.

iPhone 5 shutting down with 20% battery life left

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