Unibody 17"  ::  Sporadic abnormally large current draw from Battery

Hi all,
I have the Unibody Macbook Pro 17"
Using the "power" pane in the system profiler, I often monitor the current drain on the battery while I'm out and about.
Usually, during normal usage, this is around 1.5 Amps.
However, every once in a while, the current drain goes up to 3 Amps.
I'm using the same graphics card, not using the HD more, not using wireless more, not doing any processor intensive tasks (Activity Monitor look the same each time, max of 1% usage when I'm testing this).
Does anyone know what might be causing the sporadic - and rather large - variations in battery usage? An extra 1.5 amps of current drain kills batteries FAST....

Hi kemsleyc,
How often does it actually happen?
Any sign of HD noise etc at the time? Bluetooth is "unused' you say but is it on or off?
But I think what you are probably really seeing here is the sort of transient changes in current usage attendant upon momentary fluctuations in CPU demand and the like. The information provided by System profiler in this area is pretty crude really. It is simply an instantaneous "spot" reading of demand, rather than providing much in the way of real info about power usage.
The following is a graph of current usage of my own MBP13 over roughly the last hour. During the time recorded I've been essentially just surfing around on the Apple boards, with a few forays to other places, with maybe 8 tabs open concurrently in Safari. the only other applications open during this time were Hardware Monitor (used to do the recording), Activity Monitor, and Mail.
As you can see the current demand from the CPU spends most of its time varying up and down over a range from about .5amp to 1.5 amps, but there are intermittent "spikes" that go substantially higher than this - right up to 9 Amps on one occasion. I haven't bothered to correlate them with specific activity, but I suspect they primarily relate to things like accessing new web pages, checking mail etc. The "super peak" may have been when I visited a Flash website or some such.
If you want to monitor such things regularly and effectively then you might want to think about using a program, like Hardware Monitor, that will provide you with a continuous , rather than the basic "spot" reading provided by System Profiler.
Cheers
Rod

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