Power Usage

[domi413]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I searched the existing issues and did not find anything similar.

Current Behavior

I've noticed that when I plug in the power supply, the software displays the power usage as approximately 80 watts. This value represents the charging power rather than the actual power consumption.

It appears that the software is unable to differentiate between charging power and the power being used. It would be great if the charging power could also be displayed, but perhaps under a separate category such as "Battery Charge" instead of "Power Usage."

Environment

resources: 1.5.1
nixos: 24.05

[nokyan]

Hi, thanks for the issue.
The battery entity in SysFS itself only exposes the stat that Resources currently shows. There are other SysFS entities though for each charging port (in my case at least) that show the nominal charging speed (e.g. exactly 45W for my 45W charger). I doubt though that the constant 45W is actually real and I'm not sure if I want Resources to display a charging speed of 45W if in reality charging speed is much lower because the battery could already be quite full. I'll think about it. :)

[domi413]

The issue I'm referring to isn't that the charging speed might be incorrect, but that the charging power is displayed as "Power Usage" instead of "Battery Charge."

[domi413]

I took another look at the issue and measured my laptop’s charging power. The charging rate is around 40W, while the laptop’s power consumption is displayed as approximately 30W. Normally, when not charging, the laptop draws about 7W. Based on this, it seems that the actual power allocated for charging would be the difference between the charging rate and the power usage (40W - 30W = 10W). Alternatively, the 30W shown might represent the net power gained by the battery after accounting for the laptop’s baseline power consumption (which is also the value btop++ shows)