The iPhone is a great companion and it always has something for you to do, unless the battery is dead. Once the juice drains away, you’re left with a pretty paperweight in your pocket. It’s a real frustration when you’re struggling to make the battery last between charges, and no one wants to be plugging into an outlet more often than they have to. Try out these iPhone battery tips to buy yourself some extra time.

Turn on Low Power Mode

If you have iOS 9 or later installed on your iPhone, then you can take advantage of Apple’s newfangled Low Power Mode. You’ll find the toggle to turn it on in Settings > Battery > Low Power Mode. The feature temporarily turns off or reduces mail fetch, Siri functions, background app refresh, automatic downloads, and some visual effects until you fully charge your iPhone.

Turn down the volume

You should consider turning the volume down on your iPhone and using headphones whenever possible, thus allowing you to reduce the impact of audio on your phone’s battery life. If you take a look in Settings > Music, you can also set a volume limit and turn the EQ off to save even more power.

Turn off iCloud

Automatically backing up to iCloud can drain your battery and eat through your data allowance. It’s a useful feature for backing up precious photos, but there might be a few things being backed up that you don’t really care about or need. Take a look in Settings > iCloud and toggle off anything you don’t want.

Kill “Hey Siri”

This feature is an unnecessary battery drain if you don’t really use it, mostly because your iPhone will be listening for “Hey Siri” whenever it’s charging. To turn it off, go to Settings > General > Siri and turn Allow “Hey Siri” off.

Don’t bother closing apps

A lot of people imagine that the apps listed when they double tap the Home button are actually still open in the background and using battery life, but they usually aren’t. Outside of Background App Refresh, which we’ll look at soon, the vast majority of apps are not doing anything when they’re not in use. You can actually end up draining more battery by double tapping theHome button and quitting them all the time, so don’t do it.

Turn off Background App Refresh

You can start your journey of iPhone battery discovery by going to Settings > General > Usage. As a quick test, try making a note of the remaining standby and usage times, then tap the sleep/wake button and wait 10 minutes. Then, go back to Settings > General > Usage and you should find standby time has increased by 10 minutes. If it hasn’t, then something is keeping your iPhone from resting, and it’s likely an app.

Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and take a look at the list. Do you really need all those apps updating themselves in the background and draining your battery life? Be ruthless and turn off all the apps you don’t need to update automatically. Remember, they’ll still update and work as normal when you fire them up, they just won’t keep running when you’re not using them. If you find that you don’t like the change, you can always head back into this section and toggle the apps back on again.

Switch Push Email to Fetch

Do you really need to get every email as soon as it comes in? Maybe you’ve got a secondary email account that isn’t so important. Go into Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and switch from Push to either Fetch or Manual. With Fetch, you can set an interval, such as every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and so on, for your iPhone to check for new email. The longer you make the interval, the less battery you’ll be using. With Manual, it will only check for new email when you open the app.

Kill Push notifications from apps

Some apps will send you notifications that you don’t really need. Go to Settings > Notification Center and look under Include. Tap on any apps that you don’t need notifications from and choose None under the Alert Style, and then toggle Show in Navigation Center to off and Show on Lock Screen to off.

Turn off Automatic Downloads

You can have your iPhone update Music, Apps, and iOS automatically, but it will eat a lot of battery life. Your iPhone might also choose an inopportune moment to update everything. You can save power and battery life by going into Settings > iTunes & App Store and sliding Use Cellular Data to off, so it only updates on Wi-Fi. You’ll save even more if you just turn the automatic downloads off altogether and update on your own schedule.

Reduce screen brightness

The screen drains battery faster than anything else and the brighter it is, the faster it drains. Go to Settings > Wallpaper & Brightness and turn Auto-Brightness off. Then, set your brightness to the lowest setting that still looks readable. You might have to tweak it from time to time, but you’ll save a lot of juice this way.