Why laptop discharging while plugged in?

Laptop batteries are designed to be recharged by powering the device from an AC outlet. But, sometimes this isn’t enough and the battery needs more power than what is being supplied to it. If your laptop starts to discharge while plugged in, there are a few things you should check before assuming that your charger or cable may not be working correctly. The first thing you want to do is make sure that the power supply has enough juice for both your laptop and any other devices connected with it at all times. For example, if you’re watching TV on your laptop via HDMI then turn off standby mode on your TV so that it’s also drawing power from the wall instead of just draining into nothingness during standby mode like usual! Next up,

Battery over time plugged in

Don’t leave your computer plugged in for long periods of time while its fully charged because this will harm your battery’s lifespan. Even if the battery is technically not charging (its voltage is under ~4.05V), it still uses power and reduces the overall lifespan of your battery over time. This is why lithium-ion batteries should only be charged when they need it. The same goes for other types of rechargeable batteries like nickel-cadmium (NiCd) and nickel-metal hydride (NiMH). There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to laptop batteries – each one is unique and needs to be treated as such. However, following these guidelines should help you get the most out of your battery:

-Avoid leaving your laptop plugged in for long periods of time while it’s fully charged.

-Don’t let your battery completely die before charging it (this is bad for the lifespan of your battery).

-If you’re not going to use your laptop for a while, remove the battery from the device.

-If you want to keep your laptop plugged in but still have it charge the battery, use a low-power charger like the Apple 29W USB-C Power Adapter .

Your laptop’s battery is made of many smaller batteries called cells. Each cell outputs a nominal voltage of about 3.7 volts, for a total of about 4310 mAh when it’s fully charged. The battery controller in your laptop uses those cells to build a larger 42-volt battery out of them. When you use the computer on battery power alone, this larger battery sends the 42 volts equally to both the built-in laptop charger and to a DC/DC converter chip inside the computer itself. This DC/DC converter takes that 42 volts and steps it down to around 19 volts so that it can be used by different components inside the laptop, such as the CPU and motherboard chipset. At these lower voltages, the cells in your battery will be able to produce a lot more power.

Around 43 watts of this total power consumption is going towards running the laptop’s components with an additional 30 watts going to the built-in charger and 29 watts going to the DC/DC converter though some of that might get shunted around depending on what you’re doing at any given moment. This leaves very little extra power for charging your battery while you’re using it. While it takes about 60-65 watts to charge up your battery when its capacity has fallen very low, only 4-5 of those watts comes from the DC/DC converter and none of them come from the built-in charger so if you want to charge while you use your laptop, you’ll have to turn it off.

laptop’s battery life

It’s not that your laptop is discharging when it’s plugged in – it just feels that way because of how power management works. Your built-in charger has a very low minimum voltage cutoff so unless the battery is completely flat, it will keep trying to push some power into the battery even when they’re both at their respective maximums (your charger is using up the extra power). Of course, if your charger were working perfectly, there would never be any leftover power anyway because everything would go towards charging your battery instead of powering the parts of your laptop. So in short: anything running on DC current needs to use an AC/DC converter to convert the DC current to AC current. This is true of all electronic devices, not just laptops. The power consumption of components inside your laptop varies depending on what they’re doing (browsing the web vs playing a game, for instance). A 42-volt battery can provide enough voltage and amperage to run many different components at maximum power consumption. This is why you might see your laptop’s battery indicator fluctuate when you switch between running programs: it doesn’t mean that your battery isn’t charging – it just means that some parts of your computer are drawing more power than others.


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Wasim Cheema
By Wasim Cheema

Wasim Cheema is a tech enthusiast who is passionate about all things that have to do with laptops and gadgets. He provides unbiased laptop reviews on different tech sites, where he has been sharing his thoughts on the latest technology for over 8 years now. His technical knowledge has helped him in providing sound advice on various topics including laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other consumer electronics which are often difficult to find a reliable source of information on the web.


The Laptop Arts is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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