-Title: The Life and death of a laptop battery
-Tags: english
+Title: The life and death of a laptop battery
+Tags: english, debian
Date: 2015-09-24 20:00
<p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time of the lap top at
years ago, I decided to monitor its state to have more hard facts when
the battery started to fail.</p>
+<img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
+
<p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
by someone else. I found
-<ahref="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
broken. I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
from him. Via
-<ahref="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
+<a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
discovered
-<ahref="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
+<a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
available in Debian.</p>
<p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
and out of hibernation and suspend. In addition, it collect a value
every 10 minutes. This make it possible for me know when the battery
-is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over
-time. The log file look like this:</p>
+is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
+The code for the Debian package
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
+available on github</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
<pre>
timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
</pre>
-<p>I even wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge
-development over time. This show the slow death of my Lenovo Thinkpad
-X230 laptop battery:</p>
-
-<img src="images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
+<p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
+over time. This graph depicted above show the slow death of mylaptop
+battery.</p>
-<p>But why is this happening? Why are my laptop batteries dying,
-while the batteries of space probes and satellites keep working year
-after year. If we are to believe
-<ahref="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
-University</a>, the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to
-100% all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the
-time. I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
-<ahref="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
+<p>But why is this happening? Why are my laptop batteries always
+dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
+satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe
+<a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
+University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
+chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
+all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
+I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
+<a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
-100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a Tesla,
-but that is another story), which I guess is the option we should have
-for laptops on Linux too.</p>
+100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
+like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
+story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
+Linux too.</p>
<p>Is there a way with Linux to tell the battery to stop charging at
80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in preparation for a