Inxi says my batterys condition is 89%?

[John1776]

Im on Manjaro GNOME. I bought this laptop a few month ago. I don’t use it often (its HP ENVY x360 13 from 2020).

My inxi is saying this: condition: 45.5/51.0 Wh (89%)

Does that mean that 11% of my battery is like totally dead? My current charge is 9%.

Full inxi:

System:
  Host: manjaro Kernel: 5.11.2-1-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc 
  v: 10.2.1 Desktop: GNOME 3.38.3 tk: GTK 3.24.26 wm: gnome-shell 
  dm: GDM 3.38.2.1 Distro: Manjaro Linux 
Machine:
  Type: Convertible System: HP product: HP ENVY x360 Convertible 13-ay0xxx 
  v: Type1ProductConfigId serial: <superuser required> Chassis: type: 31 
  serial: <superuser required> 
  Mobo: HP model: 876E v: 12.38 serial: <superuser required> UEFI: Insyde 
  v: F.13 date: 09/09/2020 
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT1 charge: 4.9 Wh condition: 45.5/51.0 Wh (89%) volts: 10.9/11.6 
  model: Hewlett-Packard PABAS0241231 type: Li-ion serial: 41167 
  status: Discharging 
  Device-1: hid-0018:04F3:2AF4.0002-battery model: ELAN2514:00 04F3:2AF4 
  serial: N/A charge: N/A status: Discharging 
CPU:
  Info: 8-Core model: AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics bits: 64 
  type: MCP arch: Zen 2 rev: 1 L2 cache: 4 MiB 
  flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm 
  bogomips: 31949 
  Speed: 1356 MHz min/max: 1400/2000 MHz boost: enabled Core speeds (MHz): 
  1: 1356 2: 1367 3: 1282 4: 1398 5: 1397 6: 1397 7: 1397 8: 1397 
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD Renoir vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: amdgpu v: kernel 
  bus ID: 04:00.0 chip ID: 1002:1636 class ID: 0300 
  Display: x11 server: X.org 1.20.10 compositor: gnome-shell driver: 
  loaded: amdgpu,ati unloaded: modesetting alternate: fbdev,vesa 
  resolution: <missing: xdpyinfo> 
  OpenGL: renderer: AMD RENOIR (DRM 3.40.0 5.11.2-1-MANJARO LLVM 11.1.0) 
  v: 4.6 Mesa 20.3.4 direct render: Yes 
Audio:
  Device-1: AMD vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel 
  bus ID: 04:00.1 chip ID: 1002:1637 class ID: 0403 
  Device-2: AMD Raven/Raven2/FireFlight/Renoir Audio Processor 
  vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: snd_rn_pci_acp3x v: kernel bus ID: 04:00.5 
  chip ID: 1022:15e2 class ID: 0480 
  Device-3: AMD Family 17h HD Audio vendor: Hewlett-Packard 
  driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus ID: 04:00.6 chip ID: 1022:15e3 
  class ID: 0403 
  Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.11.2-1-MANJARO 
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8822CE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter 
  vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: rtw_8822ce v: N/A port: 2000 
  bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 10ec:c822 class ID: 0280 
  IF: wlo1 state: up mac: d8:c0:a6:31:4a:c7 
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Realtek Bluetooth Radio type: USB driver: btusb v: 0.8 
  bus ID: 3-1:2 chip ID: 0bda:b00c class ID: e001 serial: 00e04c000001 
  Message: Required tool hciconfig not installed. Check --recommends 
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 476.94 GiB used: 170.11 GiB (35.7%) 
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Western Digital 
  model: PC SN520 SDAPNUW-512G-1006 size: 476.94 GiB speed: 15.8 Gb/s 
  lanes: 2 rotation: SSD serial: 20084C803847 rev: 20120006 temp: 32.9 C 
  scheme: GPT 
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 451.82 GiB used: 170.11 GiB (37.7%) fs: ext4 
  dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2 
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 299.4 MiB used: 312 KiB (0.1%) fs: vfat 
  dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1 
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 16.6 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) 
  priority: -2 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3 
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 41.9 C mobo: 20.0 C gpu: amdgpu temp: 41.0 C 
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A 
Info:
  Processes: 331 Uptime: 1h 23m wakeups: 2730 Memory: 15.09 GiB 
  used: 5.17 GiB (34.3%) Init: systemd v: 247 Compilers: gcc: 10.2.0 
  clang: 11.1.0 Packages: 1690 pacman: 1669 flatpak: 11 snap: 10 Shell: Zsh 
  v: 5.8 running in: gnome-terminal inxi: 3.3.01

[Yochanan]

That’s the estimated battery capacity. Batteries wear down after awhile.

[John1776]

It worries me because I don’t use this laptop a lot

Btw I found a tool called TLP. Is it possible to use it to power my laptop from the AC and not the battery so it doesn’t wear out when I have it plugged in and use it as a workstation?

[Yochanan]

Modern hardware already does that. TLP isn’t able to do anything like that unless you have certain Thinkpads.

[Falav]

I’m not a battery specialist, but I don’t think they age less when not using them, rather than the contrary.
Maybe (but not sure at all) batteries could tend to wear out more when forgotten in a drawer compared to be used often.

[omano]

There is actually a proper discharge level and proper charge cycle to maintain to wear less but nature of batteries mean they will die no matter what you do.

Not using a battery indeed can still wear it, even damaging it if it goes too low on the charge.

Lot of documentation about that on google.

What it reports is the theoretical charge and its actual charge. It can only go down from here as battery WILL wear over time.

[h2-1]

Just FYI, batteries really hate two things, one is being too low voltage, aka, no charge, the other being at too high voltage, that is, 100% charge, for too long. So not using a device for a long time may in fact be a bad thing. As an aside, when I had my car battery replaced a while back, the guy pointed out that batteries need to be used or they degrade more quickly, that’s lead acid, of course. I know I had one relatively new laptop battery that I simply never used after buying it, and then when I put it in to test it, it was 100% dead, critically low voltage, won’t take a charge. That often means just one single cell went too low, but the battery management system doesn’t care, if it’s too low, it’s too low.

If you want to achieve maximum life in li-ion batteries, I believe the basic formula is try to never go below 10% charge, or above 90%, and that will keep the battery happiest for the longest time. It’s just chemistry in the end though, nothing magic. This is also how you keep your cell phone batteries alive the longest, in other words, don’t leave it plugged in overnight.

Since I actually have learned a lot more about what matters in batteries since I made the original -B battery logic for inxi, the new inxi, coming shortly, will have some things fixed, first the oversight to not show charged percentage of available capacity, which was supposed to show, but didn’t, is fixed, and now shows. Second, if your battery voltage is within 0.5 volts of of the minimum, the minimum meaning if it drops lower, it’s then dead, unfixable, -B will now always show the user the voltage no matter what -x level you had, or none. Thinking on it, if it’s within .5 volt of minumum, maybe it should say something like note: critical or something like that.

[John1776]

First of all, I would like to tell you I just LOVE inxi! It’s a great tool!

But when it comes to my battery life. Do you think that capping its max charge at lets say… 75% and having it plugged it in as a workstation would be okay?

[h2-1]

Is there a way to do that? I know I leave mine plugged in, and their battery condition degrades year by year, but I haven’t seen any way to to set the maximum charge, do you know of one? Certainly having it set to about 75% would result in a hugely enhanced overall life.

If you think about it, there is a VERY good reason why cell phone makers do NOT offer this, it’s because if you could cap the charge, your battery would last a lot longer. A norwegian company is offering a charging cable modifier that will stop charge at around 90%, but it only works on a few phones, high end stuff, but that’s why they do it, the charging to 100% is a total scam by device vendors, as is their decision not to allow users to control max states of charge.

Note that almost all electric car makers include in their batteries larger than listed capacity, specifically to avoid ever charging over 100% of listed capacity (which is not 100% of actual capacity), or going under 0, which is not actually 0, this buffer is specifically designed to not kill the battery prematurely. But small devices don’t want to dedicate that extra capacity that would never get used, nor do they want to protect against prematurely killing the battery, because that drives upgrade sales.

Let me know if you find a way to do that, I’d move all my laptops to that immediately since otherwise they end up killing the batteries by overcharging them over time.

Glad you like inxi, watch for 3.3.02, which is coming very soon, just finalizing some BSD corner case stuff, but it’s a huge upgrade that will catch many little glitches and corner case errors, the release notes will list most of them.

As an aside, I’ve used rechargeable batteries for decades now, and I started noticing that all the ones that I routinely charged and discharged but didn’t let get to 100% or 0% much, basically lasted nearly forever, but the ones that I left unused as backups started to die quite consistently, or lose capacity, that is mostly nickel metal hydride, but I think the principles are largely the same.

[John1776]

I and a few of my friends have started to research that. Apart from BIOS/hardware level utilities that a specific laptop can have, programs like TLP and PowerTop are very good. Manjaro comes with TLP by default which is great. Im in the process of finding the solution, but TLP looks very promising

[John1776]

Btw given a scenario of using my laptop as a workstation what would be better?

Capping my battery capacity at lets say that 75% and just having it basically plugged in all the time so I guess it wouldn’t drain those 75 actually?

Or to also leave that to be 75 cap but also give it the ability to discharge to lets say 25% so when Im using it and I have it plugged in, the battery charge would be constantly oscillating between 25% and 75%? Im not really sure if thats a good idea, because I guess each charge damages the crystals?

[h2-1]

You’re asking good questions, basically, these types of lithium ion cells have several limits on them, one being cycle life. Cycle life is the number of full charges, that cycle life varies based on the chemistries being used and a few other factors, including the quality of the materials used etc, but call it between 500 and 800 for a laptop. If you’ve noticed, inxi fails often to show cycle life, that’s because there’s a bug somewhere in many batteries and they don’t report their cycle life to the kernel, some do.

So in your scenario, if you went from 75% to 25% constantly, every 2x you did this, you’ve used one charge cycle, 50% + 50% == 100% == 1 cycle. If you did this say 2x a day, you’d end up with a degraded battery after 500 days, degraded means I believe about 80% of original capacity, that’s when the battery chemistry starts to break down faster.

Really tight control over battery management should in theory lead to greatly enhanced battery life.

A few new chemistries and techniques are coming but I don’t believe we will see them in mobile devices because they have less capacity for the weight, but a huge increase in cycle life, like, from 5-800 cycles to 4000, but the tradeoff there is decreased energy density, which small device makers don’t like to do since users want longer times per change.

If I were to guess, I’d guess the best for a battery like mobile devices use is to keep it always somewhere in the 60-80% charge range, once in a while run it up to 90% or down to 10%.

If they can get the new lithium iron phosphate stuff to gain in energy density, you might see them in mobile devices, though with less charge capacity, but I doubt we’ll see that since that would mean your batteries would last basically forever. Given that they are lower cost, and it would be a selling point that they are safer, higher cycle life, charge fast, etc, maybe we will see a phone maker or laptop/tablet maker offer these in a few years, I’d jump on it if it were since the new stuff basically is designed to fail as quickly as possible, forcing you to buy a new device.

By the way, there’s some lingering rechargeable battery myths from the old days of nickel cadmium, which were super delicate, prone to degradation, and did actually require things like charge/discharge to max/minimum now and then to prevent chemistry breakdowns that led to reductions in capacity quite rapidly, this is not the case as far as I know with the newer chemistries, but the myths linger on, lol. Nickel cadmium, aka, nicad, totally and utterly sucked, worst ever, glad they are gone, they had no upsides at all compared to the newer things.

[John1776]

Hmm okay, so oscillating between 25 and 75 would basically just wear out my battery faster.
And the best would be to set it to that constant 75% and just let it rise/fall when I just unplug it and go somewhere to use it.

Also here is something from TLP:
https://linrunner.de/tlp/settings/battery.html

[h2-1]

It’s an interesting question, your use matches mine, where I basically leave my laptops plugged in constantly, which ends up destroying the batteries with barely any cycles due to the near max voltage constantly, or, having spare batteries I never use, which leads to low voltage, and rapid battery failures. So this is an interesting question for me. There’s a bit of testing, but from what I understand, I believe it ‘should’ lead to best results to do fewest cycles, fewest stresses by going near 100% or 0%, in theory, you should get super long life from this, near the max possible.

Next best is to always control the charge, which should result in getting very close to the rated cycle life, which is pretty good, that can be 5 or more years, maybe 10 if you do it perfectly. Everything else kills it quickly, which is what they want, particularly when it’s built in soldered batteries, not replaceable.

[John1776]

My biggest problem in this laptop (HP envy x360) is that opening it would basically destroy a lot of things. and cause permanent damage

Thank you very much btw! Now at least I know what I have to do! Thanks a lot again!

[h2-1]

read the tlp stuff carefully, some thinkpads have issues when changing the thresholds, but I didn’t know this was possible to try, so it’s worth looking into. tlp looks very interesting.