Mayby it is a bit supid to ask, but i want to use me 65W Charger with the Frame.work
Is it safe to use or do the 5 Watt more stress the battery in the long term?
Thanks and greetings!
it’s perfectly safe. the wattage figure is only the maximum the charger is capable of supplying, the framework will take what it wants up to that maximum, and in any case the battery is regulated by the charging circuit.
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@Peter_Schofield Thanks, My old Macbook air did take double the watts then the original charger.
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@Johannes_T Just to reiterate what @Peter_Schofield said just because I’m not sure you understand what he said. If a charger is capable of supplying 100W of power and the laptop only capable of drawing 65W, then the charger will supply 65W. If a laptop is capable of drawing 100W and you pair it with a 65W charger, the charger will supply 65W and the laptop will charge slowly or whatever. You can’t damage the laptop by charging as long as you use USB-PD certified chargers and USB-IF certified cables that support the correct wattages.
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Just in case anyone’s interested, since I have a measurement tool handy, I’m charging my 12th gen FW now, it seems happy drawing 70W from a 100W PD charger when the battery is <50% on idle. If I close the lid (s2idle), it draws 64W charging. I noticed this goes down to 50W when battery goes >50%, and I’m sure the battery controller brings it down lower as it gets closer to 100%. (something like gnome-power-statistics could be used to plot this curve for those sufficiently interested)
Note for those measuring, the power delivery at the USB-C port (voltage, amperage, wattage, with a hardware monitor) does not match anything being reported by /sys/class/power_supply in Linux. The latter I’d assume would be more representative of what’s actually happening to the battery itself.
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This should not be necessary, but with
ectool chargecurrentlimit ...
you can set the limit (in mA) on how current is used for charging. So if you’re concerned that the normally enforced charging limits are too much tuned toward fast charging and less for battery health preservation you could limit the charging current even in the presence of a high-wattage-capable power supply.
See The Framework Laptop's Embedded Controller (EC) :: HowettNET for information on ectool.
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But Framework needs 60W, not 65W. So if a device requests 60W (from 65W charger) which is not explicitly supported by charger - how much charger will give in such case? is this still safe?
Oh, for this specific case found an answer here
Maximum Charging Wattage
Looks like you found your answer, but I’ll add anyway.
Yep, totally fine with USB PD power supplies / chargers. The device will only take what it needs.
USB PD power supplies are intelligent, they only provide the voltage a device requests.
If it was a different power supply, it could potentially be a problem. You should never provide higher voltage than the label on a device says. Current / Amps is safe to be higher. Voltage is pushed, current is pulled. Or put another way, voltage is forced, whereas current is just taken as needed.
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Just to clarify, I meant what if device request an intermediate power of what charger supports. So, assuming PPS is not supported by both device and charger (or only by one of them), will charger just give closest supported lower power of what was requested?
Yep. It will be fine.
USB PD power supplies start off at the USB standard 5v, then change voltage only if the device requests it. The power supply will provide whatever voltage the device requests & it will also provide the full current / amps that the power supply can provide. But current is only taken as needed, having more available causes no harm. Power / Wattage is voltage x amps. 60W would be 20v at 3A. Whereas 65W would be 20v at 3.25A.
PPS is an optional feature, so no device can expect that will be available. And anyway since USB PD power supplies start off at the USB standard 5v, any device has to be able to take 5v at least during negotiation / checking if other voltages are available.
My personal experience tells otherwise:
I had a Sony 2016 y. phone that came with 850 mA charger. I charged it with Xiaomi power bank (by default it had 2-3 times more amps of output, same voltage, no PD support) for 6 months and at some point phone stopped charging at all. System board was replaced to fix this. Also, the phone was pretty noticeably heating in the middle (exactly between battery and mainboard) only while charging with the power bank.
Too much current itself is not a problem, you can google “voltage is pushed, current is pulled” it’s a fundamental principal. But some power supplies can be built in such a way to create a problem if the current the device needs is a lot lower than what the power supply was designed for. In order to make them as inexpensively as they can, they cut corners on being absolutely safe 100% of the time for all devices. How much they cut corners depends on the power supply. If the current drawn is a lot below what the power supply was expected to supply, is can do funny things. Like have high voltage ripple. Some devices can deal with this ok. Others not so much. Maybe not dying right away, but rather if exposed to high voltage ripple for long enough time.
Now, Xiaomi I’ve heard makes decent devices, Sony shouldn’t be bad either. And 850mA isn’t that low, and especially back in 2016 that would be common. But, I’ve heard Xiaomi devices are a popular target for counterfeits. Even places some people might not expect can have a lot counterfeits, like amazon. No-name brand devices or counterfeits, all bets are off. Forget about just killing your device, you’re just lucky if it doesn’t catch fire. They completely ignore even the most basic safety.
But one device dying tells you nothing. It could have been that a particular device was especially sensitive. Could have been completely unrelated.
Anyway, for the question of a 60W Framework laptop connected to a 65W Framework power supply, that will be 100% fine. 20v at 3A vs 3.25A is extremely close. Much bigger differences would be fine as well. 45W fine too. And done very often. A quality laptop power supply will need to handle variable draw, down to relatively lower levels.
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