Hello gang! It’s been awhile. Have noticed as of recently that the laptop battery drains faster than before, and while looking at different power management options (tlp, tuned) wanted to ask: how to extend battery usage?
Currently have a few power managers installed (upower, xfce-power), and saw that some are also running simultaneously, which made me wonder if they are fighting over resources, or conflicting for hardware control.
The question would be: is it OK to have various power managers run simultaneously?
What do you guys use for power management, specifically laptop battery management?
If logs need to be provided please let me know. Thanks in advance!
what governor is your cpu using on battery? (That’s kinda the main thing for power saving) And no, multiple power managers can and will conflict with each other, you only want one unless one is a dependency of the other.
I would check the Arch Wiki for the make and model of your Laptop. If you’re lucky you might find some more details about known issues and some directions how to address these.
Sadly I don’t use EnOS on a Laptop, thus my experience with that is limited. But I do use the power-profiles-daemon for manual profile switching, even on my desktop.
In addition to that, you could use powertop to run an analysis of all your hardware devices and their power states. It comes in handy to identify power settings which negatively affect your overall power consumption. E.g. auto suspend modes for bluetooth or wifi devices. And connected devices on the USB bus of your machine. More info on that is available in the Arch Wiki as well. It also links to further related topics such as power saving and laptop mode tools.
Using tuned at the moment as my main power manager, and to be honest not sure what the defaults are for tuned. Might have to read more into the docs to find out.
Though, noticed upower seems to start at boot even though the service isn’t enabled by default.
As for powertop, have read it does cause some issues, mostly overriding much needed parameters to save power and what not, so haven’t really dared to try it.
All tuneable settings suggested by powertop can be overridden.
With my Desktop I don’t had issues up so far. And the annoying auto suspend modes for the USB 2.4G receiver dongle which I’m using were easily deactivated.
I think it would be good if a battery is between 40% and 80% loaded. If a BIOS supports something like this it should be set accordingly.
If BIOS doesn’t support this (could be that this applies for the majority of BIOSes) then this https://chargie.org/ would be a possibility. It looks like Chargie isn’t yet available for laptops.
you may check how good your battery still is: cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full*
It returns two numbers, the full capacity and the design capacity.