Topic: Switch Lite battery depleting fast overnight

@WoomyNNYes Switch OLED bought around Christmas 2021, it has happened with games both turned on and off.

@Alak96 Ah, so you're leaving Wifi turned on?

I may try to reproduce it with my oled tonight, out of curiosity.

@WoomyNNYes I’ve also kept wifi on as well, which should be a reasonable function to keep on, even with a handheld.

Wonder if you or anyone else can replicate this? Thanks for all the interest and questions, too.

@WoomyNNYes Yes, I always have Wi-Fi turned on due to sharing my account with my brother's Switch. I will try to have it off tonight and see if something changes.

@Alak96 I’ll do the same. Let’s see what happens !

With the Lite, even without battery problems, I would recommend turning the wifi on only when necessary.

It's a little extra bump of battery life for a console with a rather small battery.

@michaelf Yeah, I agree. Wifi should be a reasonable function to keep on. Although, if battery is depleting much faster now after update 14, that's obviously not acceptable. I'm just curious about nailing down the specifics of the issue, to document it, in case the info helps anyone going forward.

@Eel
Airplane mode = Offline mode, right?

@Anti-Matter yup

@WoomyNNYes agreed. Useful to pin down what changed / changes and what the consequences are, to try and triage an issue. Basic QA work (helps that I work for a software company!)

@michaelf I'm assuming it's ok, after Alak96 mentioned the same issue, I used nintendolife's Contact page for News Tips to mention the issue & citing this thread, in case NL wants to try to reproduce & confirm the battery depleting issue.

My Lite doesn’t seem to be acting any different after the update. But I could do a few tests.

So I kept my Lite in sleep mode, although with Flight Mode ON. Interestingly it kept battery power to only 1-2% depreciation, which is what has happened in the past when I’ve taken it away abroad (remember those days?).

So on first glance, wifi is massively draining the battery overnight even when not downloading anything. After the system & NSO updates, no game got updated overnight, so not sure what is going on there. It would appear I have a workaround (but no ‘fix’)

@michaelf same here, last night I left my OLED in sleep mode with a game on and no WiFi, and battery run out as it used to (around 3-4%). As you said, since the latest Switch updates something is causing the console to keep connecting to the Internet even in sleep mode.

I wrote an email to Nintendo Europe to report the issue, hopefully they will fix in the next system update.

@Alak96 thanks; perhaps with the next NSO update the Ninty engineers may correct the issue 'on the sly' or just call it 'stability improvements' etc.

I left mine with airplane mode off, with a game on hold in the background, the battery dropped by 3% overnight.

So should I try with no games suspended?

Are there perhaps any games or settings you two might have in common that I don’t?

Edit: Wait do you have any games with large save files, and automatic save backups on?

@Eel if I'm not mistaken, my settings at the moment are airplane mode off, mid brightness and no auto brightness. Also, regarding the save files, the only new save file I've created in the last two weeks is for Kirby, and its size is fairly small. My largest save files (according to the Switch) are MH Rise, Animal Crossing and the N64 app, but I haven't used either since February, I think.

Just deleted all cookies from the console (including the NSO section) and redownloaded all the NSO apps (Genesis, N64, SNES, NES, Pacman and Tetris) just in case, because I don't think I have bought in game in the last two weeks since this issue appeared (apart from Lego Star Wars, but issues started much earlier). I also removed and inserted the microSD again just to try something.

I will try with Wi-Fi on tonight, and if nothing changes, tomorrow I'll reset the device and download everything again. Let's hope something sticks!

My settings seem reasonable and I’ve checked any rogue overnight cloud save uploads and the last seven games are all the NSO apps, Tetris 99 and MarioKart. That’s the largest file at 75.7Mbs which last updated on April 3rd at 20:14, so not even overnight, nor has anything updated overnight at al by the looks of things.

It looks like my Lite has used a whole 4% throughout the day, which over a ten hour period isn’t too bad (and that’s with wifi on, although no game being played).

It’ll be interesting to see if the next NSO N64 update changed anything. If not, I might do a wipe and reinstall see if that helps …

Nintendo has steps to address the issue stated by the OP. @michaelf You don't need to reply, but I thought I'd tag you for the update.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/04/nintendo-shares-adv...

@WoomyNNYes cheers for the tag. I had noticed an improvement with the last download so hopefully along with the article you’ve linked that’ll sort things out. Cheers!