Excessive battery drain while sleeping after 10.13.4 update

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Excessive battery drain while sleeping after 10.13.4 update

My 2013 Macbook Air could always sleep overnight without losing more than a percent of battery life. But after the 10.13.4 High Sierra update, it started dropping to 78% or even less overnight if put to sleep by simply closing the lid. I measured the loss at about 6-8%/hour until it goes into "deep sleep" after the default 3 hours. I scoured the forums and tried most of the recommendations (reset SMC and pram, disabled Power Nap, etc.) except a complete reinstall of OS X. I finally discovered that if I turn off WiFi manually before sleeping, it only loses 0.6%/hour (10x less) or just a few percent until deep sleep overnight, still more than it did before but tolerable. I will adopt this add'l step before sleep until Apple fixes this obvious bug that they introduced with the 10.13.4 update.

MacBook Air, macOS High Sierra (10.13.4), null

Posted on Apr 23, 2018 3:55 AM

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Answer 1

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bobwesson Author

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Apr 26, 2018 4:26 AM in response to bobwesson

After further research on the forums, I finally used Terminal to enter the command "sudo pmset -b tcpkeepalive 0". Now my Macbook Air is back to losing less than 1% overnight. The only "cost" to doing this is that Find My Mac is unavailable whenever it's sleeping, just like it had been before.

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Answer 2

May 5, 2018 4:21 AM in response to bobwesson

Hey there,

I've also had a problem with my rMBP 2015 13" waking up frequently during sleep, giving me issues with battery drain during the night (around 10% every eight to ten hours).

I noticed that my Mac would persistently show up in my router's list of connected devices while sleeping, but after using the command you suggested,

sudo pmset -b tcpkeepalive 0

it no longer shows up during sleep on battery power.

Thanks for updating with your solution. I really hope that Apple gives an official fix in a future update.

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Answer 3

bobwesson Author

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May 10, 2018 4:13 AM in response to bobwesson

New tentative hypothesis: Even after trying every trick suggested in various forums, after updating to 10.13.4 sometimes my Macbook Air battery would lose around 20+% overnight while other times it lost 0-1%. I've now finally figured out that it'll do the latter every night only IF I unplug power BEFORE I close the lid to put it to sleep. No idea why this order matters after the OS update, but it seems to resolve the issue of high battery drain while sleeping, and it's an easy enough habit.

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Answer 4

bobwesson Author

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May 17, 2018 6:14 AM in response to bobwesson

So .. again .. I hope that I've figured it out. Buried in Apple's fine print is a comment that various externals may prevent sleep. Although I don't keep external displays or USB devices connected, ever since my original Macbook Air in 2010 I've kept a 64GB SD card plugged in. I removed that and so far my Macbook Air under 10.13.4 loses at most 1% of its battery charge overnight now. My current Air has a 256 GB SSD so the SD card isn't nearly as essential as it used to be. Finger crossed!

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Answer 5

May 5, 2018 4:21 AM in response to Meepalicious

I should also mention that I also didn't have this problem before updating to 10.13.4. Prior to that update, my battery would decrease at most 1% during the night.

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Answer 6

bobwesson Author

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May 7, 2018 7:03 AM in response to bobwesson

Ugh. Nevermind. Even with tcpkeepalive set to zero, my Macbook Air INTERMITTENTLY drains its battery overnight. So I'm back to square one in figuring this one out.

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Answer 7

bobwesson Author

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May 12, 2018 5:36 AM in response to bobwesson

Nope. After 3 overnights of 0-2% drain using this technique, I turned it on this morning to see 28% gone. Sigh. Back to the drawing board with 10.13.4, dammit!

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Excessive battery drain while sleeping after 10.13.4 update

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