Battery – Ubuntu Consumes Too Much Battery

batterypower-management

I've switched to Ubuntu 16.10 (Gnome) recently. Before, I used Windows 10. Everything is working perfectly and I really like Ubuntu. However, it consumes too much power (only nearly 3 hours compared to more than 4 hours with Windows 10). Besides, the charging time is significantly longer than in Windows.

Can anyone give me some advice? Thanks a lot.

Best Answer

You have an Aspire R7. If my assumptions are correct, it is either an Intel Broadwell-based computer or Skylake-based. (core i5/i7-5xxx/6xxx)

There are many ways to conserve power in Ubuntu. In 16.10, TLP is by default now included. Configure TLP from:

gedit admin:///etc/default/tlp

or

sudo nano /etc/default/tlp

I recommend setting your CPU governor to powersave when on battery, and performance when plugged in. There are also several other power saving settings there.

Install powertop:

sudo apt-get install powertop

And open it up with sudo powertop in terminal. You can view "Tunables" in the rightmost tab. You can either auto-adjust with:

sudo powertop --auto-tune

Or create a an HTML power report:

sudo powertop --html=powertop.html

Which you can view in the terminal directory. In that HTML file is a list of Tunable commands. Put that in your rc.local script.

If you have the Broadwell/Skylake version of the R7, you will most likely have the known C-state bug with current Intel CPUs. C-states are the sleep states that can be utilized by the CPU, and higher sleep states can save considerable power. You may need to play around with disabling certain devices (SD card reader, Ethernet, etc.) to get working C-states. Unfortunately, this is a known issue and may not be fixed for quite a while.

The current C-state bug does not allow the CU to achieve C-states lower than C3. You can view current C-states in "Idle Stats" in powertop, on the left hand side.

Finally, if you're fairly desperate, I would use a lightweight DE, or even a WM. After fixing C-state issues in my laptop, and switching to i3 window manager, I get at least 7 hours of battery life (heavy browsing, videos, even casual gaming).

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