They say that all good things come to an end, the capacity of a laptop battery is not exception.
Every battery – even those from Apple – reduce the amount of charge they hold over time. Eventually, their ability to hold a charge is so poor that you end up enslaved to the nearest available power outlet.
Checking the health of your laptop battery is something worth doing every now and then. It will help you identify if any charge-related issues you’re experiencing are battery-based, or the result of something else, like a buggy app using excessive resources and running your battery down.
Ubuntu makes it easy to check the health of your battery as it includes a handy little app out-of-the-box called, fittingly, Power Statistics.
Power Statistics App
As its technical-sounding name might suggest, Power Statistics provides energy stats for a range of connected hardware, not just your laptop’s battery or the AC adapter that’s plugged in to it. This makes it useful for more besides battery info – though that’s what this post focuses on.
Information is presented in a simple, user-friendly manner meaning you don’t need to have completed a computer engineering degree to make sense of it.
To check your battery health:
- Open Power Statistics
- Click on your battery in the sidebar
- Select the Details tab in the main view
- Find the line Energy when full
- Find the line Energy (design)
The “energy when full” figure, presented in watt hours (Wh) is the current maximum charge your battery can now hold (note: not its current charge level). The “energy (design)” figure is the original maximum charge the battery was designed to hold, i.e., when brand new.
Unless you’re using a brand new battery, fresh from its wrapper, these numbers will not match. You will see a discrepancy between these two numbers and this is normal.
The larger the gap between the two numbers, the lower the charge your battery now holds.
Want to understand that difference as a percentage? Scroll down further and you’ll see a percentage calculated from the ratio of the above two numbers: the original capacity to the current capacity. On my device, the battery is at 78% of its original capacity, which isn’t awful.
Typically, when a battery reaches 20% of its original capacity it’s time to think about a replacement (or an extra long charging cable).
There is now way to restore a depleted battery to its original capacity.
However, there are things you can do to improved battery life: turn the screen brightness down a few notches, shut off bluetooth when not needed, and reform your charging habits to avoid increasing the “cycle count” – i.e., dropping to less than 10% and charging to 100% counts as a ‘cycle’.
But as we said at the outset: batteries have finite lifespans. Even with studious stewarding, they will get to the point where you’re connected to a charger more than not. The only solution when that happens is to bite the bullet and buy a new battery.