I saw this post in another topic, and the first time that I read through it perhaps I misread this as @zash1958 saying his battery life only lasts half an hour. After a second read through, perhaps this was meant to say that it makes no difference to him if his battery lasts half an hour longer on PostmarketOS – not that his battery only lasts for half an hour.
It’s been close to 1 year that I have been daily driving Librem 5, although I bumped up to a 4/128 GB configuration Liberty Phone part of the way through that time. The Liberty phone came with a new battery, but I rotate batteries. And to be honest, for me, the longer battery availability of my Librem 5 is one of the reasons I would find it exceedingly difficult for me to go back to Android. I have gone on a 4 day vacation where I had my Librem 5 with me the entire trip to a cabin in the woods with no electricity, and for the entire vacation my Librem 5/Liberty Phone was always available to me. Because the battery is removable, I travel with 4 fully charged batteries. So, for example in the cabin in the woods, I created and developed an HTML page using vim or maybe the basic text editor, and then uploaded it to the net using the Broadmobi modem. And that might have used 80% down to 40% on the first battery, at which point I would’ve switched back up to the next battery.
But, by the time I came home from that trip, because I was only lightly using the device and was mostly doing in-person activities, I still had 2 full batteries left. On another more recent trip, I went for a 2 night trip (basically 1 full day) in a cabin, and on that trip I was taking tons of Librem 5 pictures and doing all sorts of stuff on the phone, but on that trip there weren’t cell towers nearby so I mostly was doing offline stuff. And I still had enough battery to hang out online on the phone coming back from the trip, all while never charging the Librem 5 on the trip. And this happens because I have the 4 batteries to rotate between – but again, even if I had only one of these 4 batteries, I almost got the impression from @zash1958 here that maybe one of my 4 batteries is lasting a lot longer than the one battery other Librem 5 users have.
Do we know why? Is my experience better than others? I don’t use suspend almost at all, but on the 4 day trip I frequently had my phone powered off entirely to save energy. I make frequent use of the HKS so that only the portions of the device that are useful to me at the time are powered on, and I attempted to disable the Amazon/Mozilla tracking that causes Librem 5 to report home location data to an AWS server every 5 seconds sometimes at its discretion [“geoclue”]. [Edit: Note that despite being supposedly affiliated with Mozilla, the above-described service process is not affiliated with Firefox and seems to be installed on GNOME3 and its derivatives by default; I am not talking about a Firefox thing, but rather an always-running process present on PureOS/Debian and most other “modern” distros even when no “app” is visually running.]
Are these changes what makes the difference? Do we know?
I will say that i am interested in having one Original ‘Librem 5 Liberty’.
Also at the moment L5 does not needed to carry extra batteries because it is already Good Battery Longevity with some Tricks. Furthermore L5 is not made for the purpose of changing batteries constantly.
This might be true, but I have not experienced any problems with it. I guess I had a weird issue recently where I took a battery out for a moment and put it back in and it went from 60% to 95% power and then ran for an hour or two down from 95% and I was confused by that. So, it’s possible that sometimes I was negatively affecting the % tracking. But the actual function of the batteries so far doesn’t seem to be bad.
I really don’t care what features new Android or iOS phones come up with. Basic stuff like replaceable batteries and a headphone jack are better than anything the mega-corps can come up with.
Of course, were Android or iPhones to start coming with these basic features, I’d still be on the L5 because Free Software.
I too am nearing my 1 year L5 anniversary and am never looking back.
I don’t generally go that long on battery life, though I think it would get me through most of the day with very casual use and suspend enabled. As much as I like my Librem 5, the battery life is still a big downside compared to Android and iOS devices and I am hopeful that further optimizations can make it more comparable. The Steam Deck indicates to me that there are probably ways that to further extend the battery life, especially looking at the Steam Deck’s powerful suspend feature.
I do wonder what people’s reasons are for having multiple Librem 5 batteries instead of using a power bank. It seems more convenient to just connect the bank to it instead of having to power down the device and swapping the batteries.
Due to the complexity of Librem 5 and complexity of Purism’s budget i can confirm that Purism has done an incredible job for Librem5, but that’s not all, Purism has more magical things for Librem 5 than you can not imagine.
Against that, outside of the Americas, aviation restrictions may mean that it is far easier to obtain a compatible power bank as compared with spare compatible batteries. (I have it on my agenda to get a suitable power bank but I haven’t so far done that, or really needed to.)
If you are in a remote cabin, with careful planning, it may be possible to avoid carrying the power bank in your pocket. I guess the OP can shed better light on the logistics of that.
I haven’t spent a lot of time with power banks, so maybe I’m biased and just choosing to like Librem 5, but I really do think that I enjoy the handset form factor without a dongle, so that this extra power doesn’t feel like a long drawn-out event to utilize and instead is like something that’s always active – i.e. the phone is always in its standalone “good/ready” state and yet also has the extra energy available.
I was talking to someone about it once and they suggested the electric car market might be about to dramatically shift, if folks realize they can design cars that battery swap. I heard that in China or somewhere, it changes a 30 minute stop at a “fast charging station” to instead be an instant bump to full charge by doing a swap at a battery swap station.
Anyway, if nothing else, my Purism phone gives me the freedom to battery swap while my old junker Android did not. So whether I am right or wrong to do so, being allowed to do so, for me, is liberating and fun.
For me, battery swapping is for replacement for a dead battery that no longer takes a charge.
A power pack is for charging. I went 23 days on a hike with a 10000mAh power pack and a cheap Android phone (only needed to swap power packs after 10 days). The phone was mainly for GPS + topo maps and photos and, so, while the phone was on all day every day … it was in “airplane mode” except when using it as the interface (over bluetooth) for satellite texts.
I’m sorry to say that this would not have been possible with a Librem 5.
I m interested to know any tips or tricks to prolong battery life . Even in suspend mode , over night i am losing about 40% battery life. Using waydroid at the gym with a workout app and listening to music via shortwave about 1 hour and a half workout , uses up to 80 % battery life. 15 minutes using bluetooth helmet and shortwave about 20 percent drain. Is there anything to improve it ? i already have auto suspend at 2 minutes
There is not much you can do. Most stuff is hardware and software related. You just can try to find applications that are more efficient and you can try to keep your battery healthy.
I am plugging in my phone the whole time I am at home. Once it’s fully charged it doesn’t drain the battery anymore and so it keeps it healthy. In additional I change a file that makes the phone stop charging at ~70% (as long as I do not need a fully charge to carry over the day). But these things only help that you to not loose max capacity in one, two or more years. It still happens, but a bit less.
echo 4000000 | sudo tee /sys/class/power_supply/bq25890-charger-0/constant_charge_voltage is the code to limit the max charge. After reboot it’s back to normal. If you chance the value, you also change the max amount. It does not start at 0, so keep steps little. To reverse it on code check the file /sys/class/power_supply/bq25890-charger-0/constant_charge_voltage_max - it should be 4208000. You either can write the number into the code above or copy paste it. Keep in mind, this is L5 specific.
Additional information:
The battery icon will always say you’re charging. But as soon as the red status led turns off, it does not charge anymore.
From what I remember from previous discussions there is no major benefit to limiting the battery charge, as it is already limited a little bit for technical reasons.
It’s a curve where you damage your battery. What’s hard coded is to prevent damaging your battery quickly plus some threshold plus a slower charge when it becomes full to reduce aging. But there is no point when charging does not damage it. The reason it’s not reduced further: we want to have uptime with a single charge, so we need a sweet-spot where we get most time with as little as possible damage. However you can reduce it even further if you think you do not need a full charge for your day (because you can keep it powered most of the day).
And of cause it’s less effective, but it still helps. My old phone had an uptime above 7 days (modern smartphones may just 2 days). L5 will not survive longer than one day. So the charging damage is significantly higher (you charge more often). And in my daily cycle I’m usually discharge just 20% until it’s plugged again. So it would always charge 80% to 100%, which destroys it even more. It’s not redundant, it has just a little additional effect and no huge impact.
So at the end, it makes sense if you do not need more than 50% charge before you power it the next time. If you need 60% to 100% to survive the day, you can stay without custom limits without any fear.
Thanks @Ick ! This seems to have done the trick for what I am looking for. I think. I am still playing around with it, but the key thing is it stops the charging at a set level. As you mention the level is not what you might think it is since it does not start at 0. I am trying to see if I can get 80% but it seems to be tricky.