Unhappy with Battery life

I barely get 2 hours battery with xfce…I personally use the battery from 80 - 20 percentage for better battery performance…but while i was on windows I used to get a max of 4 hours of battery and currently I use tlp but only got a 15 minutes of battery life as extra…

You might want to check with powertop if there are any areas that could be improved.

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A few tips:

  • Disable keyboard backlight
  • Lower brightness
  • Use ethernet instead of WiFi
  • Disable Bluetooth if you don’t use it
  • Set CPU governor to powersave
  • Powertop has a tab in which you can set power usage profiles for every device, set all to powersave
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This is a good practice if you leave your laptop plugged in all the time, but it sounds like you are actually running it off of the battery–in which case you are just not taking full advantage of your hardware. If you are going to be running off of the battery, charge it up all the way.

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How do you disable keyboard backlight? I have a Lenovo ideapad 5 Pro and I don’t actually need keyboard backlight. Of course it would be nice to disable and enable it when needed.

[Edit]:
Ok, I solved this by myself with the help from arch wiki. First I installed brightnessctl and then got the kdb information with command: brightnessctl --list

Device 'platform::kbd_backlight' of class 'leds':
	Current brightness: 1 (100%)
	Max brightness: 1

Then I just set the different value by this command:

brightnessctl --device='platform::kbd_backlight' of class 'leds set 0

If I want to enable keyboard backlight again I just use command:

brightnessctl --device='platform::kbd_backlight' of class 'leds set 1

After that I added these commands as aliases to my .baschrc and now I can disable and enable my keyboard backlight quite easily… :sweat_smile:

I have never used the batteries of my devices according to the 80-20 rule. The battery was drained until it was just drained (often below ten percent), I charged it, mostly at night to one hundred percent, and I did not notice that the capacity of my batteries had decreased drastically. I don’t think the battery charge is really affected by the graphical desktop operating system we use these days.

What you don’t want to do is let it drain completely, that causes permanent damage to one or more cells in it and will significantly reduce the lifespan of the battery. That’s the most important thing to keep in mind.

That said, it’s also not a good idea to run it off the mains and keep the battery charged to 100% all the time. That also reduces its lifespan, but not nearly as much as letting it drain completely.

I usually just have my laptop do the automatic shutdown at 20% or less. And I physically remove the battery (yeah, I have one of those ancient laptops, it’s great) when I’m going to use it for a long time plugged in (which is very rarely and only when I travel, since at home I use my desktop).

Of course, even if the battery is switched off, it cannot physically discharge completely.

However, many people leave their laptops on the charger and use them on the mains, which of course significantly shortens the life of the battery.

I also have a laptop for which I had two batteries, and I changed them, after charging one I took it out and put in the other battery that had already been charged in its place.

Not to hijack the thread, but how would I go about limiting the battery to 20-80% range, as most (all?) of the time my laptop is plugged in (and set to use dGPU)?

It depends on your hardware–every laptop is different.

A lot of laptops have this as an option in the BIOS menu (most modern Dell models for example).

If you have a ThinkPad you can set the charging threshold with TLP: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Tp-battery-mode

If you have an ASUS laptop, there is a variable you can manipulate in /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/ASUS

The Framework laptop has their own tool which can be manipulated in user space, which is handy: https://community.frame.work/t/exploring-the-embedded-controller/12846?u=bluishhumility

If you have something else, do a web search for your specific laptop model with some keywords like “charging threshold” and see what turns up.

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Thanks for the tip! Did a search, turns out the manufacturer Slimbook has a dedicated app for battery management. And of course, somebody has ported it for Arch. :slight_smile:

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keeping it at 100 percent is still better than constantly unplugging it, using it decreases the capacity a lot faster, not to mention the decreased performance due to powersaving

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