• Registered: 2009-06-11
  • Posts: 26

Topic: Battery life optimization

After installing Crunchbang 9.04.01 using the scripts from a minimal Ubuntu install I've noticed my AA1's battery life is uhhh, not so good. 1 hour 45 minutes not good to be exact, which compared to UNR9.04 and Crunchbang 8.10 is a bit sucky, as I was getting 2 hours plus off both.

I was wondering if anyone has any tips for reclaiming a few more of those precious watts? I've made sure laptop-mode is running already, and I've run lm-profiler and disabled the recommended daemons but I'm sure I can squeeze a bit more out of it!

  • Toolz
  • #! Die-hard
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  • From: Asia
  • Registered: 2009-02-02
  • Posts: 934

Re: Battery life optimization

Powertop offers tips:
http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Battery life optimization

you could try my power management gui, here http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … rs-wanted/  . It has all the recommendations from powertop (I don't think I missed any) plus a few other settings and should auto-detect everything for you (you'll just have to enable some additional settings as the defaults aren't very aggressive). Also if you want to keep track of how much power you are actually using look here http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … ge-script/

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 270

Re: Battery life optimization

You probably can glean some info from the Battery U.

http://batteryuniversity.com/

Sheng-Chieh

Tux's Links
http://shengchieh.50webs.com/tuxslinks.html
  • From: Hamburg, Germany
  • Registered: 2009-06-10
  • Posts: 41

Re: Battery life optimization

There is a brainstorm idea growing up, and someone will provide a ecobuntu distribution.

With the eee 901go i can suspend wifi by Fn-Key, but did not awake clearly after that. The huawei 620 can be suspended by /proc but need full reboot to work properly again. A led display can save many power if it turns dark when not in use. Darker displays on battery are ugly, cause working outside needs more brightness.

Tuxfriend

  • Registered: 2009-06-11
  • Posts: 26

Re: Battery life optimization

iggykoopa wrote:

you could try my power management gui, here http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … rs-wanted/  . It has all the recommendations from powertop (I don't think I missed any) plus a few other settings and should auto-detect everything for you (you'll just have to enable some additional settings as the defaults aren't very aggressive). Also if you want to keep track of how much power you are actually using look here http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … ge-script/


Ooh, very nice thank you!

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Battery life optimization

No problem, I'm trying to get more people to test it so I can work up the motivation to finish up the last couple bugs I have in it and start working on new features(the only two major ones I can think of are the backlight control isn't working and I've had people report that the settings don't persist after a suspend). It also let's you launch firefox with the profile loaded to ram to help reduce disk activity. If theres any other features you can think of to add let me know, I need to get back to it.

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • Registered: 2009-06-11
  • Posts: 26

Re: Battery life optimization

Hmm, well I did the installation, rebooted, put the GUI on and made sure I had a full battery and used the GUI to put it in power saving but I got the same battery life as previous, about 1 hour 20 minutes.

  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
  • Posts: 8,647

Re: Battery life optimization

Also check out the tips page on LessWatts.org:

http://www.lesswatts.org/tips/index.php

Note: ** Please read before posting **

BTW if you wish to contact me, send me an e-mail instead of a PM.
  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Battery life optimization

Did you change any of the default settings? Like I said the defaults are pretty mild, if you click on the icon in your systray it will bring up the configuration gui. There are tabs for the different sections, if the detected box is checked it found that hardware/module/whatever, if enabled is also checked then it will actually change the settings specified in the input boxes (most of those defaults are pretty good, it just doesn't enable all the settings) Also does your AA1 have a ssd or hd? I've noticed on my mini 9 most of the power saving settings don't help all that much...seems like the big power draws aren't affected. On my inspiron 1420 it gets me about an extra hour of battery though(thats with a nine cell battery).

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • Registered: 2009-06-11
  • Posts: 26

Re: Battery life optimization

Well it's the HDD model, but UNR9.04 and Crunchbang 8.04 both seemed to get slightly better battery life.

I didn't make many tweaks to it, need to sit down and google a few of the items. Like I thought a dirty ratio was just something on a *cough cough* site *cough cough* tongue

  • Registered: 2009-05-15
  • Posts: 66

Re: Battery life optimization

All I can say is Powertop + turning off Wi-fi gives me about 1h:45 extra on my EEE.

  • Registered: 2009-06-11
  • Posts: 26

Re: Battery life optimization

Managed to squeeze another 15 minutes out using wattos bring it up to....1:35 haha. I'm determined now.

  • Toolz
  • #! Die-hard
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  • From: Asia
  • Registered: 2009-02-02
  • Posts: 934

Re: Battery life optimization

As far as I know it's not good to keep running your battery down to empty. If anyone has any more info? If true, this advice runs opposite to the advice given for early NiCad batteries.

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Battery life optimization

There are only a certain number of charge cycles in a battery, so yeah the newer ones should only be run down when neccessary. The older ones you were supposed to let run down all the way so they didn't develop memory and lose charge capacity. It's recommended if you aren't going to actually be using the battery to leave it at 40% charge, and some people say to freeze it but I'm not totally sure on that one.

edit: also another 15 minutes is about a 15% improvement...not too bad in my book

edit again: also if there is that much of a difference from what you were getting before there may be something up with your battery....try(it may be BAT1 or something else,just change it if neccessary):
cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
and compare the design capacity to the last full capacity, if there is a large difference in the numbers that may be your issue.

Last edited by iggykoopa (2009-06-26 06:56:22)

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • Registered: 2009-06-11
  • Posts: 26

Re: Battery life optimization

Hmm, not sure if 373mAh is a big loss (design 2200, last full capacity 1827). Anyway, with a bit of gentle tweaking I managed to convince it after being switched on that the hour it was reporting was actually an hour and a half. So I've switched it off at 10% battery life so I can do a full charge and see what battery life it's going to give me.

That's a combo of wattospm & powertop, seems to have done it nicely. Managed to get my idle power use down to 8.55, so I think thats the best I'm going to get at the moment.

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Battery life optimization

well that means you've already lost almost 17% of the battery's original capacity, if you were seeing 2 hours at first that means you should still be getting about an hour and 40 minutes. 8.55 watts is pretty good, that's about what I get with my mini 9 and it has an ssd which is supposed to save some power (and it doesn't have a fan which should save more)

Last edited by iggykoopa (2009-06-26 11:55:09)

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • Registered: 2009-06-11
  • Posts: 26

Re: Battery life optimization

Well I was getting 2:30 hours out of UNR not too long ago, but I've accidentally ran the battery down to 0% recently so might have done a bit of damage to it.

Powertop now says I should get 2.3 hours, which I'm guessing is around 2:15 minutes, off a full charge when my power usage is around 8.5/9.5 which is surprisingly most of the time. I've currently got Deluge downloading a torrent and seeding two others, Pidgin IM signed in and Firefox with a few tabs open and it's 9.89 which I can live with!

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Battery life optimization

running down to 0% won't do additional damage, it's just charge cycles in general. Glad to be of some help to you big_smile

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • Toolz
  • #! Die-hard
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  • From: Asia
  • Registered: 2009-02-02
  • Posts: 934

Re: Battery life optimization

Reading the http://batteryuniversity.com/ link, it confirms my suspicion that you shouldn't run down to zero percent every day - that will 'damage' your battery insofaras the capacity will quickly reduce. You should run down to zero every 30 days or so to 'recalibrate' - ie let the software know how much charge is actually there so it can better make calculations in future.

[I own a HP Pavillion and recalibration doesn't work - even after buying a new battery a few months ago I'm told it's empty when it actually still has 50% left. This HP Pavillion has given me a lot of trouble.]

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Battery life optimization

thanks good to know.

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • Gask
  • New member
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  • Registered: 2009-06-27
  • Posts: 8

Re: Battery life optimization

iggykoppa, I installed the pm after reading your post in the ubuntu forum. Keep the good work going..

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Battery life optimization

Thanks gask...if you have any issues or feature requests just add them to my original thread about it big_smile hope it helps

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • From: France, but living in Prague
  • Registered: 2009-04-13
  • Posts: 222

Re: Battery life optimization

I saw on another topic the tool: eeecontrol.

I know also there is:
gnome-power-manage
kpowersave
Iggykoopa script

What is the most efficient?
Are there some other tools?
(in my case, laptop with amd64 turion + nvidia, bluetooth already disabled, and my laptop battery life is 1H45 min when seeing a movie)

I don t think a new topic is needed for that, that s why I use this one.

Thanks in advance

Adrien

  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
  • Posts: 8,647

Re: Battery life optimization

I don't think any would be more efficient than the others since they mostly do the same things. I would go for iggykoopa's gui however since it incorporates the tips from powertop.

Note: ** Please read before posting **

BTW if you wish to contact me, send me an e-mail instead of a PM.