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I get about 9 hours of battery life on my T450s and about 6 on my x220 under load, youtube, vms, coding. That is under load. My idle times, browsing something

I get about 9 hours of battery life on my T450s and about 6 on my x220 under load, youtube, vms, coding. That is under load. My idle times, browsing something like HN, or sitting in #emacs I get near 20 hours on my t450s and about 13 on my x220. I think low low low idle power consumption is key to long infrequent charges. This is because the second you are not using your computer then it should also not be using power. For example, my t450s without adjusting the screen bigness idles at 2.8W, so tons of idle time with a 97WH battery. You can't really optimize power for when you are using it. If you are compiling, you want the fastest compile time and use the most power. Same for other things that take power. I go all weekend not charging my personal laptop and the only times I close the lid is when I am going to bed. Otherwise I leave the lid open, same brightness and walk away for hours and come back and continue where I left off. So I see your point about people saying "I get 9 hours of battery life." doing nothing, but even 9 hours of doing nothing is fairly low, given I can make a 10 year old laptop get close to 18 hours, and a 4 year old one get near 21 hours "doing nothing".

weavie 8y ago
I've just unplugged my x220 and it is telling me it has 4:36 battery remaining. I only have firefox open and not doing anything else, so that 4:36 is probably quite a significant overhead. It will drop as soon as I do something.. Yup, just fired up emacs and now it is saying 3:44 remaining. Would you mind sharing what setup you have that lets you get such long battery life?
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  Currently in charge of th baby. But get power top installed. Make sure in the 4th screen in power top and make sure all settings are to "good". I made a systemd unit to do this for me know boot. I also installed tlp and have it set it's settings. Some of those cross over into what powertop does. I set some things on the i915 driver but that will have to wait until baby watch is over.
  - weavie 8y ago
    I have just installed powertop and updated the settings. It doesn't seem to have made any difference... but that's probably because I don't know what I am doing. I'll read up on it further. Thanks for the tip.
    - mbrumlow 8y ago
      What battery do you have? The thin one?
      - weavie 8y ago
        Not 100% sure, I'll have to look when I get home this evening. I think it may not be the thin one as it is thicker than the rest of the case, but don't totally know off hand what I should be looking at to determine it..
    - bashwizard 8y ago
      powertop --auto-tune Does it for me.
- demetris 8y ago
  I don’t think it is possible to get the consumption of T450s on X220. The T450s generation (and the generation before it) use ULV processors (ultra low voltage). The processors used in the T450s generation have a TLP of 15W. The processors used in the X220 generation have a TLP of 35W. On the flip side, the processors in the X220 generation (and in the next generation) are powerful, which is a good thing if you need the power and if you have the laptop plugged most of the time.
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    The x220 gets about 80% my T450s, it also seems to compile emacs a few seconds faster... Later today I will try and post some screen shots of power consumption. The x220 for sure can last an entire day on battery.
codetrotter 8y ago
I have horrible battery life on my T520, mainly because the battery is really old. I wish to purchase a new battery for it and am looking for a place to buy a battery that 1. will ship to Norway without too high shipping cost, and 2. isn’t going to explode in my face. Any suggestions? Also, mbrumlow, what distro are you running? And did you customize it in anyway aside from using powertop that you mentioned, to get it to consume low amounts of power while idle?
- paulmd 8y ago
  Track down an OEM Lenovo battery from whatever source you can find. Unfortunately, the aftermarket batteries I've tried all died rapidly, due to cells dying or going out of balance or whatever. Never had an aftermarket last longer than 6 months before it was down to a half hour or something pitiful. Finally sucked it up and bought an OEM battery and two years later it's still giving a couple hours of runtime.
lettergram 8y ago
I actually just had the motherboard on my T450s go down. I was regularly getting 10 - 20 hours of development time with the 97WH battery (usually emacs, posgresql, rails and music). You should be able to optimize and get even higher. I'm actually considering getting a new T480 (since it has the battery expanded slot), but I'm struggling to decide.
dandruffhead 8y ago
What OS are you running? I'm really curious on your setup if you're running Linux. I have the same Thinkpad but it's impossible for me to the the idle wattage like that.
- sdfjkl 8y ago
  Ubuntu 18.04: https://geoff.greer.fm/images/x210.jpg https://geoff.greer.fm/images/x210.jpg
  - ggreer 8y ago
    That’s what I’m using, not mbrumlow. Also I just upgraded to 18.10 to get a newer kernel and a newer version of the r8169 module. That unlocked PC7 idle states and increased my battery life by 50%.
jarcane 8y ago
At my previous job I had a T460p with the full-sized double battery setup, and I routinely got 12 hours actual use with room to spare, and this was on a more or less stock Fedora install without even bothering to do any real power consumption optimizations. Modern T-series still have amazing damn battery life, and I’ve never found anyone else who comes close except Apple, or Android ARM hybrids like the old ASUS Transformer Prime with the double batteries.

weavie 8y ago

I've just unplugged my x220 and it is telling me it has 4:36 battery remaining. I only have firefox open and not doing anything else, so that 4:36 is probably quite a significant overhead. It will drop as soon as I do something.. Yup, just fired up emacs and now it is saying 3:44 remaining. Would you mind sharing what setup you have that lets you get such long battery life?

mbrumlow 8y ago
Currently in charge of th baby. But get power top installed. Make sure in the 4th screen in power top and make sure all settings are to "good". I made a systemd unit to do this for me know boot. I also installed tlp and have it set it's settings. Some of those cross over into what powertop does. I set some things on the i915 driver but that will have to wait until baby watch is over.
- weavie 8y ago
  I have just installed powertop and updated the settings. It doesn't seem to have made any difference... but that's probably because I don't know what I am doing. I'll read up on it further. Thanks for the tip.
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    What battery do you have? The thin one?
    - weavie 8y ago
      Not 100% sure, I'll have to look when I get home this evening. I think it may not be the thin one as it is thicker than the rest of the case, but don't totally know off hand what I should be looking at to determine it..
  - bashwizard 8y ago
    powertop --auto-tune Does it for me.
demetris 8y ago
I don’t think it is possible to get the consumption of T450s on X220. The T450s generation (and the generation before it) use ULV processors (ultra low voltage). The processors used in the T450s generation have a TLP of 15W. The processors used in the X220 generation have a TLP of 35W. On the flip side, the processors in the X220 generation (and in the next generation) are powerful, which is a good thing if you need the power and if you have the laptop plugged most of the time.
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  The x220 gets about 80% my T450s, it also seems to compile emacs a few seconds faster... Later today I will try and post some screen shots of power consumption. The x220 for sure can last an entire day on battery.

codetrotter 8y ago

I have horrible battery life on my T520, mainly because the battery is really old. I wish to purchase a new battery for it and am looking for a place to buy a battery that 1. will ship to Norway without too high shipping cost, and 2. isn’t going to explode in my face. Any suggestions? Also, mbrumlow, what distro are you running? And did you customize it in anyway aside from using powertop that you mentioned, to get it to consume low amounts of power while idle?

paulmd 8y ago
Track down an OEM Lenovo battery from whatever source you can find. Unfortunately, the aftermarket batteries I've tried all died rapidly, due to cells dying or going out of balance or whatever. Never had an aftermarket last longer than 6 months before it was down to a half hour or something pitiful. Finally sucked it up and bought an OEM battery and two years later it's still giving a couple hours of runtime.

lettergram 8y ago

I actually just had the motherboard on my T450s go down. I was regularly getting 10 - 20 hours of development time with the 97WH battery (usually emacs, posgresql, rails and music). You should be able to optimize and get even higher. I'm actually considering getting a new T480 (since it has the battery expanded slot), but I'm struggling to decide.

dandruffhead 8y ago

What OS are you running? I'm really curious on your setup if you're running Linux. I have the same Thinkpad but it's impossible for me to the the idle wattage like that.

sdfjkl 8y ago
Ubuntu 18.04: https://geoff.greer.fm/images/x210.jpg https://geoff.greer.fm/images/x210.jpg
- ggreer 8y ago
  That’s what I’m using, not mbrumlow. Also I just upgraded to 18.10 to get a newer kernel and a newer version of the r8169 module. That unlocked PC7 idle states and increased my battery life by 50%.

jarcane 8y ago

At my previous job I had a T460p with the full-sized double battery setup, and I routinely got 12 hours actual use with room to spare, and this was on a more or less stock Fedora install without even bothering to do any real power consumption optimizations. Modern T-series still have amazing damn battery life, and I’ve never found anyone else who comes close except Apple, or Android ARM hybrids like the old ASUS Transformer Prime with the double batteries.