Figuring Out Why Your MacBook Battery Drains At Night

Is your MacBook battery draining at night? This is probably due to a piece of software on your Mac that is misbehaving and waking it while it should be sleeping. There are several ways to figure out which could be the culprit. You can use various tools to compile a list of suspects and then quit those before putting your MacBook to sleep to test them. You can also try things like reseting parts of the system and trying safe mode. You may be able to figure out the problem on your own, or you may need to take it to an expert.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. So you say your MacBook is loosing battery power while it sleeps at night. Let's see if we can fix it.
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So online forums are filled with people complaining that when they put their MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air to sleep at night it wakes up in the morning and it has lost a considerable amount of its battery power. I'm not talking about 3 or 4%. That's kind of normal. It's doing some maintenance at night, checking your email and all of that. So it's okay to loose a little bit. But loosing 20, 30, 50% is not normal and it means that most likely some piece of software is waking it up and using some of that battery while you think it's sleeping.
What we're going to do is we're going to compile a list of suspects. Apps and system extensions that may be preventing your Mac from sleeping and draining your battery at night. The first place we're going to look is Activity Monitor. The easiest way to get there is Command Space to bring up Spotlight and search for Activity Monitor and hit return to launch it. You're not going to see anything here right away that will help you. What we're going to do is go to View Columns and there's a column here we can turn on called Preventing Sleep. This will actually list apps that are stopping your Mac from sleeping. We're going to Sort By that column. I'm going to click it as many times as I need to get to all the yeses at the top.
Now these are the beginning of our list of suspects. You'll see things in here that are apps that you know. System extensions that you've installed and things that you may not know like, for instance, HIVD. HIVD is the human interface device demon and is that part of your Mac that talks to your trackpad or mouse and keyboard. So nothing unusual there. But we'll take a note of what apps show up with yeses after them.
Next we're going to go to System Preferences and then go to Users and Groups and click on Login Items at the top. We're going to see a list of apps and extensions that will launch automatically so you may not even know that they're running because they just launch when you login. Now a lot of times people see things here and say, oh let me try and turn that off and they'll go right to this check box here. This check box is for whether or not the app is hidden when it's launched. It doesn't actually stop it from launching. So ignore this. If you want to remove something from there you could click it and hit the Minus button. But that's not the proper way to do it because there could be an app for something you're using that's relying on this and now you're going to get errors and all of that or it's going automatically be added back to the list.
The proper way to remove it is to figure out what the app is and find out how to remove it from the list. For instance, Night Owl here is this little extension here that allows me to easily switch between light and dark mode. If you go to Settings in it and I can see there's a run-on boot setting. I turn that off and it removes from the list. That's the proper way to remove it. You could also Control click on anything here and Show in Finder. So if something is listed here and you don't recognize it, you don't know what it is, then Show in Finder will bring it up. Sometimes the location will make it obvious what app that process belongs to. In addition to turning these off sometimes you just want to Uninstall them. If it's something you're really not using anymore, you want to find the app, find the proper way to uninstall the app using the app's uninstaller, or removing it using Launchpad.
So we're going to continue to look for suspects this time using the Terminal. Now don't worry if you're not comfortable using the Terminal. We're not actually going to use it to change anything. We're just going to examine some Settings and some Log files. To launch the Terminal use Command Space, search for Terminal and launch it. Now the command we're going to run is called pmset -g insertions. This is going to give us a list of things that are telling your Mac it shouldn't go to sleep. Now you're Mac isn't sleeping right now so there's going to be a bunch of stuff there and the thing that's keeping your Mac awake at night may not be there because this isn't the middle of the night. So we're just going to get some more suspects out of here but we may not find the culprit.
So you're going to see a bunch of things up here with ones next to them and they'll all kind of make sense. For instance you're using your Mac now so of course it's not going to go to sleep. I even have an external drive that's in use right now so it's going to prevent your Mac from going to sleep. Then you're going to get a list of things and some of these you'll recognize because they'll have names of apps like ScreenFlow is what I'm using to record this right now. We're just looking for suspects now. You don't need to understand every single line here. What you do want to look for are apps that you see. Like, for instance, if you see Goggle Chrome here. Goggle Chrome has been known to keep Macs awake at night if you're viewing certain webpages like certain parts of YouTube. So if you see a bunch of Goggle Chrome stuff here then maybe Goggle Chrome might be a suspect for this.
Next, I'm going to clear this using Command K and clear it. Here's the next one. It's also pmset and then this time log and I'm going to use grep to basically filter out the lines and only get lines that have the word sleep or wake in them surrounded by spaces. Only give me the last fifty of those. I'll include these commands here in the post at MacMost.com. Okay, so this is actually a log of things. This isn't telling me what's happening now but what's happened in the past. So I can see here, in fact, that Goggle Chrome has kept my Mac awake. So definitely a suspect.
Let's do one last command. This is actually going to be
log show for the last 4 hours, we can change that to 8 hours, for instance. Then it's going to put it in the style of a system log and it's going to look also for wake and sleep. This one will take a little bit longer to run. So note any apps or things that you recognize in here as well.
So now that you have a list of suspects you can simply test it out next time you put your MacBook to sleep for the night. Make sure those things are no longer running. Make sure they've been Quit. Maybe Quit out of those system extensions. See if your MacBook sleeps without draining the battery too much. If it does you know it's one of those things. Maybe you could add them in one by one to see which one is actually causing the issue. Then you may, or may not, have your problem solved. If you don't here are the next steps.
So Apple actually has a page that pertains to this. I'll include the link on the website. Part of this page talks about if your Mac wakes when it should be sleeping or it doesn't go to sleep at all. It has some suggestions here. One of the suggestions is to go into System Preferences and then look under Energy Saver. You should look at Wake for Network Access and try turning that off. That's another suspect as well. There's also some suggestions here. One of those is to Reset the SMC and reset the NVRAM. There are steps here. I've also done videos on those in the past. So you can try those out and then let it sleep at night and see if resetting those has fixed the problem.
Apple then suggests trying some more tests. One such test is to Start Up in safe mode. That's when you restart your Mac holding the Shift key down. That puts it into safe mode. Safe mode doesn't run any extras. Any extensions anything that's supposed to launch at startup. Basically it's launching your Mac bare bones. So what you want to do is just before you go to sleep restart your Mac in safe mode and then let it sleep the night on safe mode. If it works and your battery doesn't drain means there definitely is some piece of software running on your Mac, some system extension or something, that is draining the battery because that didn't launch during safe mode and everything was fine.
Now similar to safe mode you can also create a new User Account. You can create as many user accounts on your Mac as you want. Don't do anything special with this user account. Don't set anything. Don't run any apps. Nothing. So then logout of all your user accounts and login into that new user account just before you put your Mac to sleep at night. If the battery doesn't drain with that you know it's the difference between a brand new user account and what you've got going on that's causing the issue.
If none of this has led to a solution don't worry too much about it. After all we're not all computer experts. We're not all auto mechanics either. That's why we go and take our cars to shops to go them fixed, right. So now you can take it to the Genius Bar or a local tech expert. Have them look at it and you have a lot of information that you can give them.
In the meantime there is a temporary fix. That's to simply not let your MacBook sit just on battery power at night. Have it plugged in. I have to mention that because there's still a few people out there that for some reason believe that they shouldn't have their MacBooks plugged in at night. You absolutely should. You should keep it plugged in whenever you can. Sometimes it's not possible. For instance you have one charger that sits on your desk so if you MacBook ends up on your nightstand at night it's not easy to plug it in. If you're having this issue and you can't take it to an expert right away then you may just have to keep it plugged in at night to avoid the battery draining.
So if there's one take away from this it's not normal to have your MacBook battery drain a lot at night. If it's happening to you you should try to figure out what it is or take it to an expert for help.
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Here are the Terminal commands I show in the video:
pmset -g assertions
pmset -g log | grep -e ' Sleep ' -e ' Wake ' | tail -n 50
log show -last 4h --style syslog | fgrep -e ' Wake ' -e ' Sleep '
Here is a link to that Apple support page:
If your Mac doesn’t sleep or wake when expected