Howdy,
So I’ve been seeing a significant reduction in battery life for my librem 5 in the past 3 weeks, and I just can’t seem to figure out why.
I’m seeing the following for power usage(all with screen off):
mic/camera off, wifi & modem on: uses 10% of battery power in 15 minutes
mic/camers & wifi/bluetooth off, modem on: 6% of battery life for 15 minutes
all kill switches off: 3% of battery life per 15 minutes
All of these numebrs seem very high for power consumption in comparison to past values
upower reports my battery capacity is 91% so I don’t think it’s batter degradation…
I’ve run top a variety of times and see nohting taking up CPU time. I just don’t und
Random upower run when done with wifi/modem on:
native-path: max170xx_battery
power supply: yes
updated: Sun Feb 13 07:01:48 2022 (56 seconds ago)
has history: yes
has statistics: yes
battery
present: yes
rechargeable: yes
state: discharging
warning-level: none
energy: 4.29574 Wh
energy-empty: 0 Wh
energy-full: 12.7387 Wh
energy-full-design: 13.8572 Wh
energy-rate: 4.07365 W
voltage: 3.72141 V
time to empty: 1.1 hours
percentage: 67%
temperature: 34 degrees C
capacity: 91.9286%
technology: lithium-ion
icon-name: 'battery-full-symbolic'
History (charge):
1644760907 67.000 discharging
History (rate):
1644760908 4.074 discharging
1644760907 3.724 discharging
I’ve tried flashing the phone to factory defaults to no effect.
Any thoughts?
Perhaps this procedure might help (if not tried already):
I think that this charging of battery “until the red LED goes out” will help out and having Librem 5 powered off might provide quite better environment for doing that. With percentage: 67%, as you posted, your battery should pick up around 5V/1.5A from original power supply, I’d expect.
Did those, the battery life is the same, however now the capacity reports as 50% which matches the power observations. I guess I need a replacement battery…
If you are in USA. If not the purism shop says they will not ship due to regulations. There is still no EU selling point for purism. How does one replace his batteries if not in the USA? The shop provides no solution. But a solution must be found.
I ordered (later in addition to my order from October 7, 2017) to my L5 an additional battery. Both (L5 and battery) arrived in Germany w/o any kind of problem.
I also ordered a second battery with my L5 but this second battery does not behave as expected (it gets empty faster than the battery that was in the phone). And if it dies, Purism gives me no option to buy a spare battery.
Batteries can only be shipped together with equipment (stupid air carrier regulations impose horrendous fees otherwise), so you could get an extra battery when ordering a phone. But if in a few years you need another battery, then - providing nothing changes during this time - you will be out of luck.
Maybe they could be shipped via, you know, a ship I can wait 2-3 months for a new battery if I’m certain that it will arrive.
send your phone, with battery removed, to Purism and Purism can send the phone back to you containing a battery.
These regulations are a problem and the regulations weren’t created by Purism, nor can Purism realistically get the regulations amended.
But we digress.
So does this translate to … need to charge the phone every 2.5 hours?
I would say that the time to go from 100% to 0% is a better metric than the drop in 15 minutes (where the drop e.g. may not be linear). If you are going from 100% to 0% in 2.5 hours then have you contacted support@puri.sm about that? I wouldn’t assume that the battery is faulty as I expect that the software is still being fine-tuned.
No that is not the problem. The problem is that Purism did not manage to fulfill its promise to have presence in EU. I remind you that it was supposed that L5 for EU will ship from Germany. It did not and this raised its cost for me for more than 60 euros since DHL charges almost nothing to Germany and high amounts to weak European countries like Greece to do the customs handling.
So please top justifying Purism on this. I can understand that it is not a big company and erratically thought they will cover EU with the miserable DHL that pampers its Germany customers. And I do not want to make it politic but I count the euros in my pocket.
Um, yeah, but I am not in the EU - but I still have the same problem with getting a replacement battery. So having a presence in the EU goes exactly zero of the way towards solving the actual problem here for me - getting a replacement battery - and the airline regulations that make getting a replacement battery a problem.
Getting more sane airline regulations would solve the problem of getting a replacement battery for everybody.
I faced a similar problem recently: the battery started degrading and in the end broke completely. I was slightly worried when I saw that the purism shop can only ship a replacement battery to Europe together with a phone, however, after contacting support@puri.sm the problem was resolved quickly. I received a replacement battery by now (shipped from a facility in Germany!). So I’d recommend to contact purism support in case the battery becomes unusable And in retrospect I should have ordered a replacement battery together with the phone …
I have seen Librem 5 batteries for sale on ebay, I actually see batteries for the device on there more than phones for sale. Not sure about the quality or compatibility, but sellers are purporting they are Librem 5 batteries.
I can wait 2-3 months for a new battery if I’m certain that it will arrive.