Battery life dismal after Evo 850 SSD installation

My wife's old Macbook Pro (Late 2011), 13-inch laptop was in pretty bad condition as far as speed goes. We regularly use Adobe Creative Cloud (mostly Photoshop and Premiere) It was running on its original HDD with 4 GB RAM, so it was time to make some improvements.

I installed the 250 gb Samsung Evo 850 Sata III SSD, and did a clean install of El Capitan. Now, the computer is blazing fast. However, the battery life has since plummeted. Cut in half at least. Here's a few things to note:

- It tried resetting the VRAM. No difference.

- I am not sure if it is an indexing issue... It has been a few days since the installation and the battery life is still bad.

- I just learned about "trim" and am going to put Disk Sensei on it when I get home today (is "trim" related to battery life in any way, or just the speed and longevity of the SSD?)

- I upgraded the RAM to 16GB (the max apple config for this model was 8, but I read somewhere that the computer can still run 16gb, its just not "apple approved"), but the battery issue was present before the RAM was installed, since it was install a few days later

- The battery is "Normal", but at 855 cycles. There was no battery issue before the SSD install, besides the normal wear and tear of the battery. Immediately after the install, super fast battery drain.

- I saw that some people said they had to change their firmware for Crucial SSDs when they installed them to avoid this issue... I have not installed any firmware for the drive since installing it.

Any help/advice? There are lots of forums on this, but I have never found one that is conclusive. Or one specific to the Evo 850.

Thanks!