Low battery life due to high power consumption on t490 thinkpad. (help needed)
So i have gotten a t490 just recently, and ive installed fedora on it, gnome power profiles daemon said it was “on my lap” and wouldn’t let me change the power profiles even when on a desk. So i masked that, and installed auto-cpufreq, but the laptop still draws about 10W (according to powertop) when watching a youtube video, leading to 4-5 hours of battery life.
Be aware that some tools might be in conflict with each other. I recommend auto-cpufreq + thermald. You could add TLP to the mix, but then you need to configure it carefully to avoid conflicts.
While I think that 5h of battery life with yt videos running is ok for a t490 you could still try to recalibrate the battery with tlp.
I have a t470s (has two internal batteries) where suddenly the performance of one of the batteries somehow got really bad. After calibration it works as good as before (upower says it’s at about 80%). I did the calibration in windows tho with Lenovo vantage as I’m still running a dual boot setup and didn’t know about tlp before.
Well Li-ion batteries are known in conventional wisdom to degrade to 70% of brand new battery life after being charged 500-1000 times. So if it was supposed to have 8 hours when new then 5-6 makes sense.
When I played around with my laptop’s power settings, the LCD screen and screen-brightness were a big power draw between 3W at dim to like 15W at max. That and all wireless functions off, if you can have an ethernet cord plugged in, no bluetooth or USB devices plugged then you can maximize your battery life. Years ago I got my laptop to host a minecraft server with screen off to like 4-5 W at idle.
E: And don’t forget if you have a backlit keyboard to turn that off.
According to this review they got 10 hours with wifi off, playing a 720p video that was stored locally on the machine. Youtube is going to have plenty of background tasks going on, wifi is going to be active downloading things, and you’ve probably got more than just youtube in the background so I would consider 5 hours to be expected without really delving deep into power saving (and probably killing performance).
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