I really appreciate this one. Have done this on my other devices too, and while it does cut battery life by a little, your battery health will remain high for considerably longer
…i just assumed they knew how to keep the battery safe already… My deck has stayed plugged in and docked since i got my projector to use with it…fuuuuuck
There’s a big difference between “safe” and “ideal”
All lithium ion batteries degrade quicker at 100% vs 80 or even 60%. But it’s not going to explode and kill you.
Actually thanks, now trust you mention it i should not have used safe. I was not meaning danger, just that i might have damaged the battery life or at least put it at risk at the least. Just assumed that it came optimised to be as ideal as valve usually goes a bit overboard on their hardware from what i remember reading
This has been possible via the BIOS for a while now, but it’s long overdue at the OS level. I love that Value keeps adding little QoL improvements to the steam deck, it’s turned out to be one of the best pieces of tech I’ve ever bought.
It’s so weird that it doesn’t have it because both my kubuntu and endeavorOS installs have it by default. Like that’s a basic feature
It was already an option in desktop mode afaik, just wasn’t part of game mode.
Decky has a Powertools plugin, what I’ve been doing, can set per game profiles and restrict charge rates as well with that.
I implemented the same on my laptop with tlp. It is actually pretty easy to do so.
What do people set it to?
Default limit when toggled on is 80%, which generally seems like a good middle ground between usability and battery life. You can also raise the limit higher if you want more battery, or lower if you want to preserve the battery life better.
I thought the steam deck already had this. Admittedly, I’ve only had mine for about a month, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it charge to 100%. I think 95% was the highest I’ve seen. It seemed like it had something similar to smart charge like Windows has.
When it charges up all the way, it stops charging and just does passthrough power instead. You can then see the battery % slowly drop over time, which is probably why you were seeing stuff like 95%
You shouldn’t see the battery drop if it is not using the battery, which is what pass through would suggest.
Not quite - batteries have something called self-discharge, which happens faster at higher temps. If you’re actively using the deck, it can get warm which speeds up this process. It’s not fast, but it’s absolutely possible to see depending on how long you leave the deck docked
Battery self discharge is measured in days at worst, more typically weeks or months. It should not be dropping 5% over the course of an hour or so even if the device is a bit warm. Plus having it plugged in should start charging again once the battery starts dropping too low.
Sparky1337 hasn’t said anything about how long it had been plugged in before he saw it at 95%, so I was kinda assuming he was leaving it plugged in overnight, or leaving it docked for long amounts of time.
On my devices where it’s available I usually set it to 80-85%.
Finally!!
Still can’t believe some phones don’t have this
The logic is deeply flawed though.
Keep your battery at 80% to preserve it’s health, because Lithium batteries prefer that. Sure. But here’s what it effectively means:
Keep your battery forever stuck at 80%… to avoid losing battery capacity… so to avoid having less battery runtime you limit your battery runtime… Thus suffering today the consequences you feared in the future.
But this 80% will last a lot longer.
80% is 80%, there’s no “80% that will last a lot longer”
… do you know how batteries work? Or how they degrade?
Consider two decreasing lines, one with a slightly lower slope. Now imagine the steeper line starting higher on this graph, eventually the lines will cross and despite starting lower the shallower line will be higher.
I mean, 80% corresponding to X mAh battery capacity. It will stay at that value for much longer.
The logic isn’t flawed, your priors are. You’re assuming that people are constantly on a cycle of charging their battery to the limit, running it down low, and then charging it again. If you mostly play docked or with a charger plugged in then capping the battery at around 80% prolongs the battery runtime for when you do turn the limit off and want to use the full battery.
If you mostly play fully charged and stationary, then lowering the charge limit means you have more future opportunities to experience the fully battery runtime when you disable the setting.
There’s absolutely no way a setting buried in a menu is designed to be constantly enabled and disabled based on when you’re using the device docked or not.
Otherwise, the toggle would exist in the quick access menu.
That’s also not how it works on laptops that offer it, so I doubt the idea is having users constantly toggling it.
That’s less of an issue with devices you use in battery mode all day, but the Deck sits on the docking Station most of the time and constantly getting held at 100%
The Deck automatically stops charging and let’s the battery drain to around 95% when plugged in anyway.
I mean, I was just gonna unplug it at 80 and plug it back it at 40.
Beforehand I couldn’t just leave it cause it would go to 100%.
If your referring to always keeping it plugged in, can’t I cap it at 60% then?
No, I’m referring to the fact that unplugging early to avoid decreasing the battery health and therefore capacity makes no sense… Because you’re decreasing the battery capacity by only using 80% of it’s charge
Short term vs long term gains.
What about only charging to 80% until I actually go on a road trip?
It’s same with electric cars, there is day to day mode and road trip mode.
I think it comes down to driver support. It’s not that the hardware can’t do this, but rather it’s that you need to pass the option to control it all the way up from the lowest levels of the system eventually into user space where you can select an option in settings.
That, and it’s just not the first priority on devices that are generally low-margin.
