macOS Mojave battery drain

Just share my observation on the battery drain issue.

Yesterday have packed my MacBook air fully charged into my bag, hardly used it during that day and now take it out with completely empty battery (<1%). The battery is brand new with 7 cycles only. So I have fired up terminal and checked with "pmset -g assertions", what could prevent sleep. I have noticed, that apparently nfsd has gained during Mojave upgrade the ability to prevent sleep. In the past I have used nfsd, so on my air is an /etc/exports file. After renaming this file by "sudo mv /etc/exports /etc/exports.off" and force-exit nfsd by "sudo killall nfsd", that nfsd was not running anymore.

Will monitor the situation and if problem is not fixed, will come back to this forum.

BTW: In case this does not fix it for some guys, then try out "pmset -g assertions" and check, what else can prevent sleep. On my air I have another candidate, which could be the root cause: The USB memory stick continuously plugged in (due to small internal disk). pmset reveals a kernel assertion from that USB. Before upgrade this was not a problem. Hope it is still not.

Actually now i am even more confused... For me the solution was returning to High Sierra, as for most people in this thread if i am not mistaken. it is a ridiculous solution but it is the only one since mojave still drains the battery in half the time..(as far as i can understand 10.14.4 is the only version we do not have enough feedback yet) So this means that there was no permanent damage to the battery. Have you tried going back to HS and see how it goes?

Same thing here. 2015 MBP working perfectly on OSX Sierra. I updated to a clean install of Mojave and was losing 20% battery during sleep immediately. Contacted Support and they recommended it was a hardware failure and tried to send me to the Genius bar since my battery is at 522 cycles.

2 days ago I downgraded back to Sierra with a clean install. Last night, closed the lid and lost 0% battery overnight. Problem solved. Hopefully Apple starts looking at their Mojave code and resolving this issue.

I had (I really hope it's in the past) a similar issue on MBPro 2013 with Mojave (now 10.14.6).

After reading this thread and trying to identify the cause of it I finally managed to link it to the Time Machine backup. I backup locally on my NAS which being a nice kid is forced to go to sleep after midnight. My assumption is the backup hung while the NAS one time switched off / or putting Mac to sleep while it was backing up didn't go all that well, after that event every night my Mac wanted to complete the hanging backup. It might sound silly and hard to believe but after switching the automatic backups I have my old but still crafty Mac again. Amazing what a real good sleep does.

Resetting the PRAM did the trick for me. No more issues with battery drain while using or when in sleep.

Possible solution: I have found that a lot of times, it's Quicklook UI. Go into activity monitor and force quit the process. This helped me.

If your computer is not sleeping at all, that can also be caused by a third party application or daemon.

You may want to try creating a test user and logging in as that user to see if it's something specific to your login that could be causing your power draw.

Hi, here is what can help you.

Start your "Terminal" application, which is command line and type:

pmset -g

(this shows you power management settings in detail)

Now change the settings by these commands, one by one:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

sudo pmset -a standby 1

sudo pmset -a standbydelaylow 60

sudo pmset -a standbydelayhigh 60

This causes sleep mode to go to hibernation after 60 seconds (you can put more/less than 60 seconds in two last commands if you want) and hibernation does not drain your battery while your macbook is sleeping. Hope this can help you. Regards, Tomas.

Hi, here is what can help you.

Start your "Terminal" application, which is command line and type:

pmset -g

(this shows you power management settings in detail)

Now change the settings by these commands, one by one (they will ask for your system password):

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

sudo pmset -a standby 1

sudo pmset -a standbydelaylow 60

sudo pmset -a standbydelayhigh 60

This causes sleep mode to go to hibernation after 60 seconds (you can put more/less than 60 seconds in two last commands if you want) and hibernation does not drain your battery while your macbook is sleeping. Hope this can help you. Regards, Tomas.

Hi, here is what can help you.

Start your "Terminal" application, which is command line and type:

pmset -g

(this shows you power management settings in detail)

Now change the settings by these commands, one by one (they will ask for your system password):

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

sudo pmset -a standby 1

sudo pmset -a standbydelaylow 60

sudo pmset -a standbydelayhigh 60

This causes sleep mode to go to hibernation after 60 seconds (you can put more/less than 60 seconds in two last commands if you want) and hibernation does not drain your battery while your macbook is sleeping. Hope this can help you. Regards, Tomas.

Yeah, you're right. I meant Location Services. I just learnt that MacBooks do not come with a GPS.

After an overheating incident due to a sudden power drain on Sunday, I canceled dynamic desktop, quit all the apps, uncheck "reopen windows when logging back in," and then rebooted the latptop twice. After the restart, I disabled Locations Services in the System Preferences. My guess was that any location services or hidden GPS activities would run in the background and could be the culprit of any extra power consumption. After I deactivated the function, my MacBooks seems fine now.

You have to reset the PRAM;) I had the same problem ... in practice if you update without reinstalling from scratch, when it goes into stop, the PC continues to work as if it were not in a stop... after that work then

I am experiencing this issue as well. It appears to be the kernal_task process that might be the culprit. I noticed my 2018 MBP was hot inside my bag after only a couple of hours of what should have been in sleep mode in my bag (I do not have power nap enabled when on battery). When I pulled it out, I immediately opened activity monitor and saw that kernal_task was using as much as 800% CPU (generally 100% CPU equates to full utilization of 1 CPU core/thread, so in the case of my 6 core i9, I could potentially get to 1200% since it has hyper-threading). That type of CPU usage would be extremely heavy type use, so there is definitely something wrong.

This needs to be fixed ASAP because the heat being produced doesn't seem to be tracked by the OS. Once I opened my MBP, it realized it needed the fan and kicked into high gear. This issue could result in CPU, logic board, battery damage and other things. It has already resulted in a few unnecessary cycles for my battery.

Hi,

I have fixed with these 3 steps:

- Clean the cache (used CleanMyMac X)

- Reset the the NVRAM (Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac - Apple Support)
- Fix the permission of the HD (disk utility -> S.O.S.)

Now battery works very good.

I will confess that I haven't read all 11 pages here, but I've read much of it and if this helps someone, then great. I believe apple will fix this in a future point release.

I have a Late 2013 13" MBP Retina. I'm having the same problem as most others. Laptop is warm in the bag and ~20% down in a few hours. Last night, I disabled wifi before closing the lid at 100%. This morning, when I woke up, the laptop was at 99% and cool to the touch. When I left to come to work, I left wifi on, and when I got to work and opened the laptop ~2 hours later, the laptop was not cool to the touch and at 90%. I used it until 79%, turned wifi off and closed the lid over lunch. 1 hour later, laptop was cool to the touch and at 78%.

I have tried PRAM and SMC resets to no avail. I have not tried a clean install or disabling bluetooth yet, but I will if a point release doesn't fix it soon. Until then, I plan to sleep with wifi off.