I am trying to power the particle electron for 7 days with a generic LiPo battery. It will be gathering data, and then sending it to the cloud. Powering the board for that long is what I’m having trouble with. By sampling the data less, I know I can utilize lower current modes on the particle, but I am having trouble figuring out how to do this.
Thank you so much for your help!
This document explains the sleep modes and tradeoffs:
There’s also a link to a calculator that you can use to estimate battery life based on your interval between wake and what modes you use.
What is the difference between battery size and battery reserve on your calculator?
Battery size is, well, the battery size.
We don’t recommend that you run a battery to empty because (1) it shortens the life of the battery and (2) you stand a good chance of corrupting the flash memory on the Photon/P1/Electron/E Series.
The reserve is the amount of energy (in mAh) to leave in reserve in the battery. The result would be the same if you use a 2000 mAh battery and a 400 mAh reserve vs. a 1600 mAh battery and a 0 mAh reserve for the calculations.
Can you point out which values you used correspond to the values on the Particle electron datasheet? I’m a little confused. For example, is the 56.7 mA you used for idle the same mode as the 180 mA operating current on the datasheet? Also, where does it specify “Stop mode (pin + time) with SLEEP_NETWORK_STANDBY: 6.53 mA” on the datasheet?
He performed measurements, this is empirical data presented by Rickkas7 .
It incorporates more specific use cases than the datasheet.
How come the values seem way different than on the datasheet? And why can’t I find any info on the datasheet about current consumption during sleep standby mode?
Lunchboxp,
Power consumption is a very empirical process and the datasheet can be indicative, but the rest needs to be done by you because your final hardware configuration, battery setup, etc will differ from anyone else’s. There is even a substantial variation in the A-h capacities of lipos, even if they are from the same manufacturer.
You really need a set of logging multimeters with uA through Amp dynamic range to project the actual run time of a system based on measuring your hardware configuration along with how your sleep/wake cycle functions. I’ve done a lot of measurements on electrons and Particle’s numbers are quite close to what I get, so the datasheets are indicative for first-order system modeling.
I would strongly suggest using deep sleep mode and waking with the modem off for measurements with periodic transmission of data to conserve power. Those techniques are well-documented on the forums here. 
Thank you very much for your response. Could you possibly link me to one of those posts?
You’re guide is very helpful. Can you confirm my understanding? Coming out of sleep (pin + time) with SLEEP_NETWORK_STANDBY mode and going into transmitting data, the transmitting takes ~12 seconds and uses an average of 161.7 mA? What was the peak current during this transmitting phase?
I can do better. There is a search box in the upper right hand corner that will bring up a lot of knowledge about sleep as well as other issues you may encounter.
