TLP preserves battery level instead of charging

General system Newbie
1

I am using TLP on a ThinkPad T490 to set charge thresholds. I’ve set the start charge to 40%, and stop charge to 80%.

When I plug in my laptop (currently with 45% battery), the status moves from ‘Discharging’ to ‘Not Charging’. On this state, I can use the laptop for hours without the battery depleting.

I guess the laptop is just running off AC power. By itself that’s not an issue, but I need it to ALSO charge upto 80% before stopping. If I have to leave the wall plug, I want to have 80% with me.

Is this intended behavior ? Can I fix this ?

2

I have been trying to enable battery conservation mode lately on my Ideapad. Even though it supports battery conservation mode, apparently it doesn’t support setting the thresholds for charging. It sets it automatically to 40% - 60%.

I know this is not the model you have but somethings might be similar. You could for eaxmple check:

upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1

cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/charge_control_start_threshold

cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/charge_control_end_threshold

Check also in your firmware settings (UEFI/Bios) and see if you find something relative to performance and battery and similar things.

3

My IdeaPad doesn’t present an option to set charge levels either. Only the currently out-of-action ThinkPad (T440).

-–

@RocketMan

I have never directly messed with TLP; just used the settings available via Plasma to set charge thresholds. Maybe those separate TLP settings are causing a conflict. :man_shrugging:

Which DE are you using?

It will certainly help if the good helpers here know a little bit about your system. Usually where I’m from (and which is actually recommended by the developer of inxi) it is advised to provide the output of

inxi -zv8

Note: The output of this command is privacy-filtered.

Not sure if that’s the general policy here though as I’ve just been a bit of a lurker up to now. :wink:

4

I believe it’s perfectly fine to ask the users requesting help to provide information about their systems.

I you would like you can have a look at: How to include systemlogs in your post. – Discovery

5

Thanks, it’'s more about the command itself as I saw a different iteration of it here somewhere (which is why I mentioned the developer; I’ve been in direct contact with him on a few occasions). :smiley: