Can't help you directly, but powertop can be used to monitor/tweak momentary power usage.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Thanks, I do like powertop. I think it's pretty good for short measurements, e.g. over 30 seconds:
% sudo powertop --time=30
The battery reports a discharge rate of 4.17 W
The energy consumed was 125 J
The estimated remaining time is 11 hours, 4 minutes
But in the real world I will not be getting 11 hours of runtime. The moment I start a browser or play a video, power consumption goes way up.
Well, no program can accurately predict how you are going to use your laptop in the next hours. The best you can do is sample a given reference period and assume it'll be the same but you have already noted the problem with that.
I'd recommend you monitor total power draw while using your laptop. It's inversely proportiaonal to battery life: If you could reach 10h at 5W, you'd only reach 5h at 10W, 2.5h at 20W and so on; you can think of it as a metric for battery drain.
Agreed, that sounds like the way to go. I was hoping there was already something to do the monitoring for me :)
If you're technically inclined, a simple bash script with a for loop could dump the time and discharge rate to a text file every minute. Then you could copy/paste that into LibreOffice calc and do yourself some pretty graphs, or whatever.
edit: just found a tool called powerstat which looks like it does sampling over longer intervals.
sudo apt install powerstat
Interesting, hadn't heard of powerstat. I'll be checking that, thanks!
🤷🏼♂️
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