I have recently bought a Framework 13 AMD DIY edition.
The laptop works perfectly fine for the most part, however one consistent issue that I’m having is the fact that whenever the battery reaches 25% it starts draining quickly. If at that point I leave the laptop for 5-10 minutes, when I come back it is already depleted completely, usually losing all work I had not saved up until that point. One time I caught it going from 16% to 0% in an instant.
I use Fedora Linux 39.20240212.0 (Silverblue) and I’m not sure whether the battery is at fault or the battery reporting in my OS.
Otherwise I have no problems with battery life, however this can be problematic and result in me losing work.
Is there anything I can do besides replacing or monitoring closely my battery indicator?
Please provide the output of: “acpi -ib” - it will tell what battery is in and what the current capacity is. It will help to determine its age.
However, that fast is weird. Could you check if there are any apps running using lots of CPU when at 25% ? Just execute “top” in a console and watch what is using most CPU cycles.
I’d want to think it might be a miss-calibration of the estimated battery level. But sounds like it would have to be really far off. Not sure if it can get that far off, and remain so after hitting zero. Do you have a charge limit set in the BIOS?
If it was not set automatically, I don’t think I set it. Last time I messed in the bios was regarding the graphics issue, setting something on the GPU settings.
yeah, either the battery is bad, or the capacity identification is not good.
Try resetting the battery capacity measurement (have to check the internet, don’t have mine yet to play with).
I think the hardware is fine but the algorithm for assessing the coulomb count that determines how the battery charge state is reported can be way off, especially where parts charges are used and they are variable.
You can have a look at graph I made. Invariably when I did a full zero to 100 recharge, the wear was reported lower ??
However I never had the power off at anything other than 5%?
You don’t have a strange setting ti say, [power off at 25%] do you?
So yes check the voltage at 25% if you can, it may be powering off early rather than the 25% not being representativeof the real charge.
No such setting. I know it because I can actually see the percentage drop rapidly from 25% to around 16%, and instantly drop to 0%. So the laptop actually shuts down at 0%, it just reaches it much faster than anticipated from the reported percentage.
I note the battery voltage can change over 0.9V whilst at the same % due to fluctuating demands on power. This isn’t something I would normally think about as 99% of the time I use the laptop plugged in.
So the graph I’m building is random % with the corresponding voltage over 2 days, so far, and various loads whilst watching catchup TV.
Once I had the auto shutdown at around 5% I waited a few hours and powered on. I was careful to lower screen etc. to use a very low drain so the voltage didn’t drop much over time.
It shutdown the second time @ 2% and 13.6V
So any ‘sudden’ load that may drop the voltage to 13.6 is likely to shut the computer down irrespective of the shown percentage.
Given I have seen a variation of over 1v during loads watching video then a second of two of 14.5V dropping 0.9 may well cause a shutdown, and this voltage I have at 18%
If I were you I’d contact support. The charge level instantaneously dropping to zero for no reason (sometimes even from a value as high as 50%) is something I’ve observed on several phone and laptop when then battery goes bad after a few years of use. Usually replacing the battery fixes the issue. Your laptop is brand new, but maybe you got unlucky and received a defective battery.
Usually this comes from one or two cells internal resistance to be bad. As soon as a certain current flows, the internal resistance will cause the cell to “burn” more energy into heat and lower the voltage. In RC Airplanes, I have that in one out of 4 battery packs. But we have the possibility to measure the internal resistance of each cell and I tend to send the bad packs for replacement.
I bet the laptop computers have that too (measuring the cell voltage) but that is only used for balancing the cells during charge and not analyzing the cell quality as only the report for the pack is returned.
In your case however, if it shuts down pretty fast at 25%, 2 possibilities:
Battery pack is bad
Electronics have a power-drop somewhere in the sensors lowering the measured voltage.
If it is ~2 years old, the wear would be at about 10% to 12% from experience (around 0.6% per month).
According to your acpi cli output, you are at 22% here. In your case, we should add the 25% where it literally shuts down to the 22% measured wear giving 47% lost capacity.
For comparison, my 4.5 years old battery in my work computers is at 67%. But I can use it until the bitter end (1%) …
@VaranTavers Depending on the age of your battery, I would ask FW if they’d replace it.
Thank you for your insight. I really hoped this is just a software problem, because getting a replacement will be finicky at best, since I’m currently not in a country Framework ships to, however I might not want to wait until I get the chance.
Theoretically I could do that, however when it is around 20% it is only a matter of a minute before it shuts down, so I will have to set that value or even higher.
I’ve never had a Framework, yet. However, I did have a Eurocom laptop that I basically left plugged into power for four years and used it as a desktop system. Its battery completely cut power at around 59 percent without any warning at all, a replacement battery on that system solved the problem for me. Sounds like a similar problem, but it’s always wise to investigate.
It wouldn’t help with getting a warranty replacement, but if you need to just buy a new battery yourself, there is https://frame-parts.myshopify.com/. They say they ship worldwide.
