If you rely heavily on your cell phone, then one of the most annoying (and perplexing) problems you can have is when your cell phone battery is not working the way it should. Believe it or not, this is a relatively common problem, and the source of the problem is not always easy to identify. If your cell phone battery won’t stay charged as long as you think it should, then you should consider the following possible causes and solutions:

Use energy-saving settings for features you don’t always use. Certain features of your cell phone use up a tremendous amount of battery juice, and it is likely that you aren’t even using them. Check your phone settings to see which features are constantly running, and then shut off features like BluTooth, WiFi, and GPS until you need them. These three features are constantly working to collect and interpret data, and they can really drain your battery, even when you aren’t making use of them.

Adjust your display screen. Adjust your display screen brightness and timeout features to conserve energy. The more battery life you want to save, the lower both of these settings should be. Fortunately, these features should be relatively easy to go without.

Data-fetching and push notifications. This applies to your phone’s standard setting of constantly checking for new data (like emails, social media feeds, news and weather apps, etc.), and notifying you right away of anything new. Unless you absolutely need to be notified of every new event in real-time, then you should set data-fetching and push notifications to manual retrieval (or something like once an hour) in order to conserve the life of your battery charge.

Purchase your apps. This is as opposed to using the free version. That is because most free versions of apps are ad-driven. Studies show that in excess of 75 percent of the energy an app consumes can be attributed to running those ads, so it is worth it (for the sake of your battery life) to shell out the few dollars for the paid version of your favorite apps.

Keep it cool. Every type of battery – from your cell phone battery to the AA batteries powering your flashlight – loses energy in the heat. Therefore, you should do your best to keep your cell phone in as cool an environment as possible at all times.

As you can see, there are some very simple things you can do to preserve the charge of your cell phone battery. Put all of these tips to use to avoid running out of charge when you most need it.

About the Author: Wuinton Machamer is a technology geek and loves experimenting with different cell phones as they hit the market. He also loves helping small businesses learn to mainstream their use of technology through gadgets, toll free numbers, cloud computing, and more.