100% battery show as 71%

Question

I have two potent batteries in my laptop

The power settings presents it like this Battery 1: 100%, Battery 2: 100% Total Battery 71%.

How should I understand these percentages? I didn't crop just to show the gs app shows the same percentage.

upower reports the following on Battery 1

  native-path:          BAT0
  vendor:               SANYO
  model:                00HW022
  serial:               2206
  power supply:         yes
  updated:              sat 22 jan 2022 12:44:14 (34 seconds ago)
  has history:          yes
  has statistics:       yes
  battery
    present:             yes
    rechargeable:        yes
    state:               fully-charged
    warning-level:       none
    energy:              18,89 Wh
    energy-empty:        0 Wh
    energy-full:         25,83 Wh
    energy-full-design:  23,51 Wh
    energy-rate:         2,53 W
    voltage:             12,721 V
    percentage:          99%
    capacity:            100%
    technology:          lithium-polymer
    icon-name:          'battery-full-charged-symbolic'
  History (charge):
    1642851854  99,000  fully-charged

On battery 2

  native-path:          BAT1
  vendor:               SMP
  model:                01AV406
  serial:               1111
  power supply:         yes
  updated:              lör 22 jan 2022 12:50:14 (12 seconds ago)
  has history:          yes
  has statistics:       yes
  battery
    present:             yes
    rechargeable:        yes
    state:               fully-charged
    warning-level:       none
    energy:              14,76 Wh
    energy-empty:        0 Wh
    energy-full:         21,18 Wh
    energy-full-design:  26,06 Wh
    energy-rate:         1,092 W
    voltage:             12,637 V
    percentage:          100%
    capacity:            68,8795%
    technology:          lithium-polymer
    icon-name:          'battery-full-charged-symbolic'

It does seem to be related to battery wear, energy/energy-full is 73% on BAT0, 70% on BAT1.

Could you [edit] your question to include the Terminal output of upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT)? This will show detailed information about the batteries making it possible to double-check the math. This is likely the result of the batteries using percentage (which would show 100%) while the total power is coming from capacity, which degrades over time — matigo, Jan 22 '22 at 00:50

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 28 '22 at 17:52

0

As @matigo suspected it is showing the percentage of the design charge capacity specification provided by the battery.

I find this odd because when my battery is at (now) 70% I imagine I should be able to charge it back to 100%.

answered Jan 28 '22 at 17:52

Captain Giraffe

311

1

Back up at 98%. I think Gnome desktop is toying with me. – Captain Giraffe Feb 13 '22 at 21:25
It's not an issue of Gnome, batteries of a certain age tend to exhibit such behavior. Eventually they fall below 100% and they are destined to be replaced. – Giorgos Saridakis Oct 07 '22 at 10:05

score 0 · Answer 2 · 2022-10-07T09:14:25.920

I also have this problem from time to time (chaotically on Ubuntu 22.04). I solve this problem by switching to the Windows axis and charging the batteries. When I return to the Ubuntu axis, the battery percentage shows correctly. Also, this problem is solved when I reset the BIOS to the default settings after several battery charging cycles (I have to do this from time to time). It looks like an incorrect algorithm of the buffer part of the BIOS. "BIOS falls asleep".

100% battery show as 71%

2 Answers2