How to conserve your phone’s battery and stay connected during flood season

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 6 — Power outages occur frequently in areas grappling with severe floods during the monsoon season.

If you’re trapped during a rising flood and left without electricity, a working mobile phone might be the only lifeline you can rely on for help.

So, if you’re living in flood-prone areas, here are some ways to extend your phone battery’s life — especially if you don’t have a fully charged power bank or laptop with you:

1. Turn on low power mode

This is the simplest and quickest way to extend battery standby life. Low power mode reduces the amount of power that your phone uses by reducing screen brightness, limiting background activity such as downloads and mail fetching as well as disabling features like 5G. Your phone battery life is optimised for essential tasks only, like making and receiving calls and for texting.

2. Text, don’t call

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has also advised people to only make urgent calls to conserve their mobile phone battery. If the network signal is unstable — which often happens during heavy rains and flash floods — your phone will increase its signal transmission power and consume more power.

So, go old school and just SMS. It takes up less bandwidth and is less likely to be disrupted even when other communication channels fail.

3. Turn on air-plane mode

If you’re not expecting any immediate calls or replies, turning on air-plane mode will help you stretch your phone’s battery life. Otherwise, your phone will be constantly searching for a network and that consumes a lot of power.

4. Limit online activities

Limit data uploads such as posting pictures on Instagram or reels on TikTok, which consume a lot of bandwidth and leads to network congestion. Your battery life depletes even faster when you’re trying to go online with a poor Internet connection. This is because your device increases transmission power to constantly search for a network.

5. Turn off some access for social media and streaming apps

Even when you aren’t actively using them, social media apps and streaming services can still drain your battery significantly because the apps continue running in the background.

So, turn off these apps’ access to camera and microphone features and change the location access to allow only when using the apps to preserve your battery life.

Additionally, turn off your phone's Background App Refresh setting — which allows apps to check for updates and new content — even when they are not actively in use.