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I just bought a new HP Laptop (Envy x360) and was very surprised to find out that it had no battery/energy management software or anything in the bios to manage the charge of the battery to keep it at ~50% when plugged in to maximize the life of the battery. They only include it on their business and "high end" laptops even though mine was $1000. I really only use the laptop docked here at home so for 95% of it's life it will be plugged in so the battery feature is important to me as when I do want to use it off the dock I get more than 10 minutes of battery.

I created a PowerShell program that runs in the background and checks the battery level once a minute and if it falls below 51% it tells a Sonoff Basic R3 switch to turn on the power supply and if the charge goes above 59% it turns the power supply off. Also when the laptop is shutdown it turns off the power supply.

I have these questions and I was hoping to get some opinions:

  1. Is doing this with the smart switch better than having the battery fully charge to 100% and keeping it plugged in?

  2. Is the percentage okay or should I add it a bit closer together (maybe <= 50% turn on power supply and >= 55% turn off power supply) or have it be 40% - 50% rather than 50% - 60%?

  3. How does charging just 10% of the battery from 50% - 60% count towards the cycle life of the battery and would adjusting it to a shorter duration (maybe <= 50% turn on power supply and >= 51% turn off power supply) or a longer duration (maybe <= 40% turn on power supply and >= 60% turn off power supply) help out?

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  • Nice idea! Unfortunately, many PC's do not come with power management hardware, but your work-around should solve that problem. Please publish the script and circuit. 80%, give or take, might be optimum charge point, and having on-off closer together would decrease depth of battery cycling (e.g., 79% and 81%) You can also try downloading HP Power Manager software. support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06179452 , but if the PC does not have hardware, it won't work.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Jan 26, 2022 at 20:28
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    Every charge counts. Charged 10%? That's 0.1 cycles. The benefits of a lower charge limits will be more than offset by the fact that you will be on battery a lot. Do not do this.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Jan 26, 2022 at 22:11
  • Daniel B, this is exactly what my concern was. I'm a software programmer and don't know enough about how the actual battery management software works and how to not make things worse. My concern was if I do this I am discharging and recharging a lot during the day and that may hurt the battery. It was a lot of fun getting this to work but the more I think about it the more I am wondering if there isn't more too the battery management software than my simple setup.
    – Jason Vorpahl
    Commented Jan 27, 2022 at 17:12
  • My concern was if I do this I am discharging and recharging a lot during the day and that may hurt the battery. ....... Your setup needs to keep the battery at a relatively stable charge rate as I noted. Simply having a setup that turns off charging and turns it back on frequently will not help.
    – anon
    Commented Jan 27, 2022 at 19:39
  • Thanks so much John. As I said it was a fun experiment but the more I thought about it the more I knew that it may be more complicated to really have this work like the vendor supplied software. I only had it running for a day so no major harm.
    – Jason Vorpahl
    Commented Jan 27, 2022 at 21:25

3 Answers 3

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I have these questions and I was hoping to get some opinions:

  1. If it works it could be worthwhile. See also my answer to number 2. Battery management is integrated in BIOS, so I am not exactly sure if this will work reliably. If it does not work, then your computer will not use it.

  2. Normal long term charge (Lenovo documentation and other articles) is 80% That is where I keep my two Lenovo laptops.

The charging should be relatively constant (up to 80%) while connected.

  1. I do not see an advantage to this as keeping to 80% is the generally accepted rule that I see for laptop battery management. Do not charge to and leave at or very near 100%
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  • "If it works it could be worthwhile" Could you please elaborate? Laptop batteries only have ~100 - 200 charge/discharge cycles before their charge capacity drops significantly, with every charge/discharge cycle lowering the charge capacity by several mAh; after ~200 cycles, often sitting at ~50% of the original charge capacity. Power management software on a laptop works by cutting the power to the charge circuit while still using the charger to power the laptop (the charger's primary job is as a PSU to power the laptop like any other PSU, with the secondary job of charging the battery)
    – JW0914
    Commented Jun 10 at 12:31
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Hey everyone I just wanted to let you know the final solution to my issue. I just removed the internal battery when docked and that fixes my worries. A bit inconvenient but works just fine for me. If you are inserted read below why I didn't just jump to this obvious solution right away.

Doing some research in HP battery management I was told that all modern HP laptops (mine was bought 01/2022) need the internal batter to run. "They" said this was needed b/c the A/C adapter didn't deliver enough power to supply the computer in certain cases such as when the CPU turbo boosts and other power spikes. It was explained that in these cases the laptop draws the extra needed power from the battery to compensate and if you didn't have a battery installed in the computer would crash loading windows or during other tasks.

After my fun smart switch experiment worked but most likely wouldn't help the problem but may actually make it worse I decided to just take the battery out and see if it works. Well it does ... running a week so far. The only issue is the CMOS. It seems to loose the settings if I unplug. I was a bit surprised it didn't have some sort of little battery like desktop and other older laptops. This isn't an issue for me. I use default setting and once windows starts it syncs up the time using NTP. I haven't seen any issues with that yet but will post back if I do.

In case you are interested my computer specs are:

  • Processor: 1th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1195G7 @ 2.90GHz 1.80 GHz
  • Ram: 16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable)
  • Disk: Intel Optane H20 with SSD 512 GB
  • OS: Windows 11 Pro (yeah I know but I wanted to give it a try)
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  • It's a bad idea to run a laptop w/o a battery since this isn't how they're designed - it will work, but downsides exist, such as what is mentioned since most chargers don't supply the actual wattage a laptop fully requires when under load (for example, I have an Alienware 18 and all Alienwares have two chargers that can be used, a 220W/180W or 330W/240W, and 220W is not enough to run the laptop under load with both discrete GPUs active without relying on the battery at times), as well as system instability and data loss if the DC jack comes slightly unplugged, causing a dirty power off.
    – JW0914
    Commented Jun 10 at 12:05
  • (Cont'd...) Laptops are electrically engineered w/ the assumption the battery will be there, with electrical engineers knowing a laptop's charger lacks the wattage to fully run the laptop while under load (many laptop chargers are 70 - 95W, with most laptops having a lower wattage, cheaper charger and a higher wattage, more expensive charger, with the latter also charging the laptop faster), so with no battery installed, enough power isn't there while under load and the same thing will occur that occurs in this instance on desktops - the system immediately powers off to protect components.
    – JW0914
    Commented Jun 10 at 12:16
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Your idea of using a smart switch to mimic laptop battery management software is flawed. Battery management involves complex algorithms for efficiency and safety, which a smart switch alone can't replicate.

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