Apple claims that the new Low Power Mode will allow you to gain 3 extra hours of battery life from your iPhone. When it’s on, it will reduce power consumption, meaning that mail fetch, background app refresh, automatic downloads and some visual effects are reduced or turned off. You’ll be prompted to activate it each time your iPhone hits 20% and 10% battery, but if you’re looking to conserve and stretch your battery for longer, it’s worth turning it on before those points. Here’s how to turn it on manually:

You can control the brightness of your iPhone’s screen with a slider (see screenshot). Obviously, the brighter you make the setting for the screen, the more power it uses up. The iPhone uses a sensor to detect ambient light in your environment, therefore dimming the screen in in a dark environment and brightening it when there’s more ambient light. When Auto-Brightness is turned on, it ensures that you’re never using more battery than you need by altering the brightness to your environment. Here’s how to get to these settings:

With Auto-Lock, you have the ability to automatically set your phone to go to sleep after a certain amount of time of user inactivity. The sooner the screen sleeps, the less power is used to run the screen and other services. It’s best to set Auto-Lock for 1 or 2 minutes. Here’s how:

Wi-Fi is faster than 3G & 4G, but it’s only available when there’s a hotspot or router to connect to. For most people, a lot of places they go to during their day won’t have this kind of connection available, so it’s not really worth keeping it on all the time and draining your battery by doing so. The best thing to do is disable the Wi-Fi when you don’t need it, and just tap it back on again when you do (possibly at home/work). To do this:

Your iPhone uses more energy trying to stay connected to a network or finding one to connect to when cellular coverage is poor. Therefore, it’s a good idea when you’re in a bad service area (such as underground on the tube) to turn on Airplane Mode, as this stops cellular transmissions being broadcasted or received from your iPhone. Just make sure you switch Airplane back off again when you need to use your phone. Here’s how to turn it on:

If you’re able to go without data but still need to be contactable, it’s a good idea to turn off 3G or 4G sometimes in order to keep your battery lasting longer. The benefit when compared to turning on Airplane Mode is that you will only disable the cellular data part of your signal, so you’ll still be able to make/receive calls, and send/receive text messages. The only thing you can’t do is access anything that requires internet connection, unless you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network. Here’s how to turn it off:

The Background App Refresh looks at the apps you use most often and the time of day that you use them, and then automatically refreshes the content for you when connected to Wi-Fi or cellular data, so that the next time you open the app, the latest update/information is there for you. Despite it’s obvious usefulness, it’s wise to reduce the amount of apps this feature is being used on, or, if you’re really not fussed, switch it off all together. To reduce it / turn it off:

If your iPhone is on iOS 7 or later, you don’t have to manually update your apps. There is a feature that automatically updates them for you whenever a new version is available, which is great, but can be majorly battery draining. To reduce the loss of battery on this, it’s advisable to turn the feature off. Here’s how to do it:

The 3D / parallax effects first introduced in iOS 7, and available on all later updates, that make your icons and notifications seem to float over the wallpaper might appeal to the eye, but when switched on are constantly using your iPhone’s graphics processor and are therefore draining the battery. You could most definitely live without these effects if you were trying to get the last hour of use out of your iPhone on a boring journey home. Here’s how to reduce the motion:

This one involves getting more to the root of the “battery draining problem”, rather than just not doing certain things and switching features off. In iOS upwards, there’s a feature available called Battery Usage, which shows the apps that have been using up the most power over the last 24 hours and the last 7 days and the amount of time they’ve been on the screen. If you keep monitoring it, you’ll be able to see if any apps are showing up at the top consistently, and therefore costing you precious battery life. From this, you can decide if it’s worth getting rid of some high usage apps – that’s the hard part! To do this: