Save Your Battery!!! - Problems with "Charge Threshold"

I'm new to this forum, just bought a Lenovo Edge E520.

One of the features I'm excited about is the "Charge Threshold" which allows the battery to charge up and drain down based on my custom parameters to increase battery life.

I have it (Charge Threshold) set to start charging at 35% and stop at 95%.

The problem is that it doesn't work!!!

As of right now, my battery is at 36% and when I check the "Power Manager" feature, it shows in the battery details, that the status of the battery is "No Activity".

I have factory reset this lenovo 3 times.!!... trying to get the charge threshold to work.

What I want it to do is this:

When the charge is below 35%, it charges the battery up to 95%....

And when it gets to 95%, it will drain the battery until it gets down to 35%, at which point it starts charging up to 95% again...

but what actually happens is that when it is that it's at 36%, and it's not charging or discharging... (and it says "no activity" in the power manager, and it's stayed at 36% for the last 12 hours)

Any help would be appreciated...

- Peter

 

Unless i'm mistaken that seems correct? If you set the lowest threshold to 35% then it will not do anything with the level of 36%. It will however start to charge if its 35% or lower.

 

Either:

- You are misunderstanding how the threshold setting works;
- I am misunderstanding how the threshold setting works; or
- I am misunderstanding your post.

This is my understanding of how the battery charging works.

Plugged in:
- Laptop is running off of AC power from power outlet.
- Batter is charging only if battery is below threshold.

Unplugged:
- Laptop is running off of battery.

When your laptop is plugged in, and the battery is above your threshold setting, it will not charge or discharge. In order to start the charging process, you will need to drop below the threshold.

Feel free to correct me if my understanding is incorrect.

 

if you're not using your laptop on battery then the battery will discharge itself very slow, which is actually good. I cant see what your problem is.

 

Ahh! That cleared things up for me now.

I had a false assumption, which was that the laptop always goes through battery to get power when plugged in and the the threshold programming would cycle the battery up to 85% and down to 35% continuously.

So as I understand it now, if the is above the predefined setting, the laptop battery will stay at the same percentage because the laptop is getting power directly from the a/c source, and bypasses the battery.

OK thanks everyone! I'm going to change the threshold settings to 92-96 and call it a day.

 

After playing around a bit with custom settings (74-80, 90-95, etc.), I found that the one which best maintained the full charge capacity was the default option of 50%... Of course there is then the paradox of never attaining full charge, but hey... So basically now I'm going to keep it at 74-80 or so, and do a reset every so often.

 

I kind of just leave it at automatic optimize for lifespan. It's worked out for me. I have power when I need it. And my battery has lasted at full power so far.