Does anyone have data of other laptops with the ultra-thins battery? Is this drain normal? I am curious to hear 2nd opinion.
Perhaps the battery might be losing quite a few % after shutdown because according to Battery University, self-discharge of lithium ion batteries is highest in the first 24 hours.
I think this is a little extreme over an issue like this, as this battery drain issue wouldn’t really have a significant impact on most users and it’s easy to get around this problem by leaving the laptop plugged in whenever you can after shutting it down. This is their first product, so it’s unfair at best to compare it to products from more established companies and then use this comparison and a flaw that might not cause that many issues to most users to justify not recommending their products to anyone.
3 Likes
I use the Framework laptop only about once a month or two, where it sits in its bag fully powered down the rest of the time. When I do need to use it, I expect the battery to be where I left it (just like every other laptop I’ve owned). I have a mid 2015 Macbook Pro sitting in my closet for the last 3 months and the battery is right where I left it.
My complaint may sound “extreme” to you, but to me, it’s adding more wear cycles of charge/discharge on may laptop’s battery which leads to earlier battery death. This isn’t what I paid for and just because the laptop sits fully powered down in its bag for a month doesn’t mean it should lose nearly a third of its charge.
You also didn’t see my eariler problem where after sitting for a month, the RTC battery discharged and the computer wouldn’t boot from battery, despite having a 97% charge. This issue seems to have been fixed with the 3.07 bios beta, but again, it’s just another battery-related issue I’ve had to deal with.
2 Likes
Thanks for the info about the battery!
In my sense, it’s okay for Framework Laptop to have an issue, comparing it to the other companies products with the same ultra slim battery from more established companies.
But perhaps the issue here is how to tell to a user.
Framework could say such as “Sorry to hear your experience. But we are trying to improve the battery issues” or “We measured the other laptops with the same type of ultra slim battery, and the result was similar. So, we think it’s normal with this battery. But we are trying to improve …”. Maybe If I were a person asking this question to Framework, I wanted to hear Framework’s will to improve the product and words to adjust user’s expectation in the conversation.
If Framework would publish a blog about the battery in the future, it might be helpful to adjust users expectations.
1 Like
The Framework laptop is awsome in so many ways, but having core battery issues just ruins it for me. Like I’ve said in several other posts, I’ve owned a wide variety of laptops over the years, and NONE of them drained the battery when sitting power down like the Framework does.
1 Like
I see. That’s sad thing. Hope we will find the root cause or the way of improving this battery drain in the state of the powered down in the future. I am looking forward to seeing the firmware to be open. That was mentioned here, and someone would find a way to improve the battery or some day Framework would ship a better CPU in term of the battery.
I just searched about “battery drain after shut down”. Here are some info.
$ sudo shutdown -H -P +0
-H = halt
-P = power off
+0 = nowThe syntax of shutdown changed with systemd. Some things still us OLD methods $(shutdown -h now), which doesn’t always do the things on NEW hardware.
There could also be extras like usb ports ON, wake on lan, and such which DO have UEFI options. Although buried in some cases, you have to disable / enable and such various options to “expose” those options. I had to delete windows keys just to have the secure boot disable save between boots on my hp 15 machines. ba053nr / bw053od
As a work around you might press and hold the power button 5+ seconds after shutting down to hardware shutdown. Although not the best practice when it comes to spinning rust drives.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/974573/battery-drains-down-even-after-shut-down
Remove the battery for several hours and check if it will drain out. If the battery still charged, it should be healthy.
One possible trouble maker could be any USB port or other device that still powered while the system is shut down.
Extra powered USBs are feature for some laptops. Usually these ports are yellow colored. Port as this could be troublemaker especially if something is plugged in this port. In most cases this feature could be disabled via the BIOS settings.
Recently I’ve discovered that the new batteries should be charged to 100%. Unfortunately I can’t find the source of this statement but this solve my problem with my new battery jump drain from ~35% to 5%.
I don’t understand this well. But it might be a clue.
https://windowsreport.com/battery-drain-shutdown/
This is for Windows. But there might be a clue.
I finally found the cause of the issue: the command “hwclock --systohc --local” causes the battery to drain when the laptop is off.
This command is executed by the /etc/init.d/hwclock script.
If I set clock_hctosys=“NO” in /etc/conf.d/hwclock, that command does not get executed anymore, and the battery does not drain.
We will take a look at this. Sounds like something is setting the RTC wake causing the laptop to go to S4 instead of S5.
4 Likes
Keep in mind, the laptop is sitting powered off, completely shut down. This is not a suspend or hibernate issue.
Yeah, I understand your situation. That’s why I did not share the articles about suspend/sleep above.
@junaruga, I’m running on Fedora 35, so there’s no such file/path as /etc/conf.d/hwclock. And whereas there is /etc/init.d/, there is no hwclock config file located there. On Fedora 35, there’s an hwclock binary used to sync the clock on demand. Maybe the NTP service leverages it, not sure. Regardless, with the system powered off, I wouldn’t think any Linux services would be running.
Yes, the article about the hwclock command is old. Fedora 35 doesn’t use init.d things, and instead uses systemd to control daemons (services).
My assumption was if the command is just executed in the process of the shutdown, it might cause the battery drain.
I can see there is hwclock command on Fedora 35.
$ rpm -qf /usr/sbin/hwclock
util-linux-2.37.2-1.fc35.x86_64
But I don’t know how to check the executed commands in the process of the shut down. Maybe do something with systemctl.
It seems the journalctl -b 1 shows the both last boot and last shutdown log? I am running Fedora 35 too.
$ journalctl -b 1 | tail -100
I did a journalctl -b 1 | tail -n 500 | grep -i hwclock and journalctl -b 1 | tail -n 500 | grep -i ntp and got no hits on either (where I’m assuming NTP might call hwclock).
OK. So, we can say that the hwclock is not the cause of draining in the completely shutdown state.
I don’t want to derail from your specific troubleshooting, but I just wanted to say I have an identical issue in the i5 DIY version running Windows 10. To be ultra-clear: my battery loses 1-2% charge per day when completely powered off. Not sleeping or hibernating: shut down.
I was about to open a support ticket and see if they could help me, but since you’re chasing this here, I wanted you to know it’s happening on a different OS as well.
@Stephen_Rodgers Thanks much for replying here. I’m sorry you’re encountering the same issue, but at least this may help get more attention on the problem. I’ve tried everything thing I can think of so far, including pull all the USB-4 modules and letting the laptop sit, but still the same battery drain. I’m hoping this issue can be cleared up with a firmware/bios update, but my battery drain problems didn’t start until after the 3.07 bios update (which was related to another problem I had where letting the laptop sit would drain the RTC battery, so you couldn’t boot from the mains battery, even if it was fully charged.)
Prior to the 3.07 bios, the main/power battery was holding a charge just fine when the system was shut down.
And if you read through this whole post, Framework’s official support response was basically, “All laptops drain their battery when they sit, sorry about your luck.”.
1 Like
I’m on 3.07 as well; I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you if it was happening on 3.06 or not though. But I can at least confirm it’s happening on 3.07 with Windows 10 as the OS.
And while Framework support may be technically correct that batteries in general lose charge over time, I’ve currently got 4 laptops in my house and the only one that goes from 100% to low 90s / high 80s over the course of a long weekend while completely powered down is the Framework.
1 Like