With AC connected and battery charge at the set threshold, the battery status as reported by the kernel often flips between charging and discharging, sometimes even within one or two seconds. (This can be seen using the Gnome battery icon or upower -d). AC is always reported as online.
This also means I get a constant stream of udev events starting tlp, which then notices that AC is still online and does nothing, but this could probably be solved by tweaking udev rules.
Some more observations:
Iâve set the charge threshold to 60% but the same happens at 100%.
Under normal load, the LED stays white (no pulsing).
This happens with the official charger (65 W) and with my CalDigit TS 4 dock (reported to deliver 97 W).
The flipping happens more frequently when I put the laptop under stress. On both chargers, when I start some CPU heavy process, I see that some power is used from the battery, and the LED switches to amber (no pulsing). The wattage reduces slowly and goes back to 0 W after some time. Under heavy load, I get higher temperatures and louder fans with the 97 W charger.
Is it true that even the 97 W supply is not enough to deliver enough power to run the laptop at full speed (because it still draws from the battery)? Can I some check how much power it actually delivers?
You can buy a power outlet meter online for less than $20. Theyâre not perfect, but it should at least tell you if itâs close to the expected power delivery. Thereâs probably a solution Iâm not thinking of that doesnât require spending extra money, but IMO itâs a useful thing to have anyway.
You can buy a power outlet meter online for less than $20. Theyâre not perfect, but it should at least tell you if itâs close to the expected power delivery.
But this would measure the input and not the output of the supply? I have a multimeter here but well, I canât just use it to measure the USB-C lines.
I may get an outlet meter but for now, my primary concern is the flipping battery indication, in particular because I see this also with the official supply. Iâd be very interested if other people see the same on their system. Iâm concerned that this constant charging/discharging kills the battery.
This charging / discharging flip-flop has been a known issue from 11th gen daysâŚFramework has yet to officially response / acknowledge the behaviour / issue / characteristic.
Even with a 90W USB-PD charger, I still see this behaviour. i.e. The system doesnât know when NOT to draw power from the battery (leave the battery alone), it seems.
The state of power [management / behaviour] with the laptop is pretty sad (suspend power consumption, overall battery runtime, sleep consistency, USB over current protection - too trigger happy, USB-PD unplug triggers wake from sleep, charge / discharge flip-flop).
Just confirming, do you see this also with the threshold set to 100%?
Yes, it would be nice to have some kind of official statement if this behavior is expected and/or if there are plans to implement a more clever charging logic.
I went to set the threshold back to 100 (from 76), saved & exit. Rebooted. Plug in USB-PD, waited for the battery to get fully charged. Then repeated my looping stress-pause-repeat test. Currently not seeing the flip-flop behaviour.
For me, I only really noticed it when I had a lower-than-100 threshold set.
Going to do a longer testâŚ
Update: Yes, Iâm seeing the flip-flop behaviour even with 100% threshold. This happens when the CPU goes into repeated boostâŚand when that happens, the battery is discharged at around 5-10w (i.e. negative charge rate) during that boost period. and the battery charge would dip from 100 to 99.7%âŚthen it goes into chargingâŚback up to 100%.
One other thing I noticed during my testing:
When Windows reports the battery is 100% fully charged, it actually isnât (according to HWInfo). There seems to be some really small charging that still goes on for about 30-45 minutes before the battery is finally settled down.
I see this constant flipping too, with 12th gen running openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux. Itâs pretty annoying. Surely thereâs nothing magic about Framework power management which would be so different to other laptops to require this?
Actually both. I turned off the notification, because itâs annoying every time to see it. But I see how the charge icon flipping at the tray and LED slightly changes the color as well.
Is the issue here that when itâs plugged in and nearly at full or full capacity it switches constantly between AC power and recharging the battery? Iâm on windows 10 and this has happened to me a bit (11th gen).