How to Check What's Draining Your Mac's Battery

To check Mac battery drain, open Activity Monitor's Energy tab and sort by Energy Impact, click the battery icon to see apps "Using Significant Energy," then review battery usage in System Settings. Together these three tools tell you exactly which apps and processes are costing you power. This guide walks through each step and then how to fix what you find.

Step 1: Activity Monitor's Energy tab

This is the most detailed view.

1. Open Activity Monitor from Applications - Utilities (or Spotlight).
2. Click the Energy tab at the top.
3. Sort by the Energy Impact column (click the header). Higher numbers mean more power right now.
4. Watch for a few minutes. A process that stays near the top continuously is your real drain, not one that spikes briefly.

Useful columns here:

• Energy Impact — a relative score of current power use.
• App Nap — shows whether macOS is allowed to throttle the app when it's idle.
• Preventing Sleep — flags apps keeping your Mac awake, a common hidden drain.

If you want to dig into a specific runaway process — say an animated wallpaper pinned at high CPU — see fixing a high-CPU wallpaper app.

Step 2: The battery menu's "Using Significant Energy"

For a quick, no-digging answer:

1. Click the battery icon in the menu bar (or open Control Center and expand Battery).
2. Look under "Using Significant Energy."
3. Any app listed there is actively costing you battery right now.

This is the fastest first check. If a menu bar utility or background app shows up here, you've found a culprit. Our guide on menu bar apps and battery covers why some status apps land on this list.

Step 3: Battery usage in System Settings

macOS keeps a longer history so you can spot patterns over time.

1. Open System Settings - Battery.
2. Review the usage graphs for the last 24 hours and last 10 days.
3. Look for Screen On vs Screen Off usage. Heavy drain while the screen is off points to a background process or something preventing sleep.

This view is where you catch slow, persistent drains that don't look dramatic in any single moment.

What the tools show, at a glance

Tool	Best for	Where to find it
Activity Monitor (Energy)	Detailed per-process impact	Utilities folder
Battery menu	Fast "what's draining now"	Menu bar battery icon
System Settings - Battery	History and trends	System Settings

Use all three: the menu for a quick answer, Activity Monitor for detail, and System Settings for trends.

How to fix the drains you find

Once you know what's costing power, the fixes are usually simple:

• Quit or uninstall heavy apps you don't actively need running.
• Loosen refresh intervals on pollers (weather, tickers, sync clients) if they let you.
• Disable "prevent sleep" behavior unless an app truly needs it.
• Replace web-runtime apps with native ones where you can — a native app idles far better. See native vs Electron Mac apps.
• Reduce background animation. Video screensavers and heavy live wallpapers run the GPU; lighter ones don't.
• Update macOS and your apps. Power regressions are often fixed in updates.

Favor lightweight apps from the start

The most reliable way to keep battery drain low is to choose efficient apps before they're ever in your menu bar. Native, event-driven tools that idle near 0% CPU beat constantly polling or web-rendered ones. Our best lightweight Mac apps roundup collects options across categories.

If you want live system stats and ambient data without adding a row of power-hungry status apps, Orbl is one tool that does this well: a native Swift live wallpaper dashboard that idles near 0% CPU, stays under 100 MB of RAM, and pauses its animation when your Mac is idle — so you get the glanceable info without it showing up under "Using Significant Energy."