Does it take more electricity to have my laptop plugged in and at 100% all the time or plugging it in when the battery gets low and waiting for it to charge back to 100%?
In: Technology
Adding to the answer above: You should not completely discharge or completely charge a battery very often. Just try to keep the battery at 40 to 80% capacity always, because even though laptops use deep cycle batteries, there is a limit to the number of complete charge and then discharge that can be done to the battery.
The best option is to:
1. Plug your laptop
2. remove the battery when it gets to 80%
3. Reinsert the battery when you remove power source
4. Wait until it falls to about 40%
5. Repeat
Generally a laptop will not limit its performance to conserve battery when it is plugged in, and therefore by design use more power while plugged in. However, this is usually a setting you can change.
Regardless, the cost of electricity in most places would make the difference negligible.
If we assume the laptop performance is the same on battery and mains (ie the computer doesn’t run slower to save battery)
Then running it plugged in will save energy. That’s because the charging process of the battery isn’t 100% efficient.
So if you put 100w of power into the system, the battery may only store 50w of it with the remainder lost as heat.
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