batterydellpower-management
Recently I noticed that my laptops battery is very worse so I checked powertop for the power consumption.
Doesn't matter what I do. The the top processes are
Radio device: btusb
tick_sched_time
Together they consume almost 15-17 W of power.
What are these services and how can I fix this issue. My laptop is a Precision 5530 from Dell.
Well I have discovered what was causing my problems. Firstly it seems that PowerTop is misreporting power usage, the numbers never seem to add up, even after resolving this issue they still don’t.
It turns out that this issue was due to the recent update of the Intel drivers via the Intel Graphics installer. I also had Nvidia drivers and Nvidia Primus for my Nvidia card and it seems somewhere along the way they were either conflicting or had messed each other up.
Firstly I removed the Intel Drivers following the instructions in this Ask Ubuntu answer
This downgraded my drivers but didn’t completely resolve the issue. It seemed that my Nvidia card wasn’t completed being turned off, so I removed all the Nvidia drivers using:
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
Then I installed bumblebee instead following the instructions in this Ask Ubuntu answer
Once that was done I rebooted and my Nvidia card was definitely off and my power usage was back to normal.
Ethernet power usage still seems high even at 3W, especially as I was using wifi at the time, but I think that PowerTop is just reporting it wrong. Apologies to anyone who spent time on this, I should have realised it was the graphics drivers but PowerTop threw me.
The problem came from a broken DKMS, as described here : High power consumption of eth0 | archlinux.org
DKMS being broken prevented bbswitch module to correctly compile during the kernel update. Therefore, the Nvidia GPU was constantly turned ON and powertop poorly calibrated so it attributed the extra power loss wrongly to the network card.
I had to purge and reinstall DKMS, bbswitch and Nvidia driver as described here : dkms does not automatically rebuild after kernel upgrade
Now I'm back at 13-14 W.
Best Answer
If you are not using bluetooth (higher power consumption) you can simply turn it off.
To turn off bluetooth only temporarily, use
rfkill:To permanently turn off bluetooth create a
udevrule:Then in the empty file, insert these lines:
Save the file and exist.
Visit the link above for even more power saving tips.