HP-15-BA013CL laptop battery drains when off, using Ubuntu 16.06

[legacyprog]

I like this laptop except for one thing: when I power it down and put it in my backpack, if I come back to it in a couple days and turn it on there's usually very little (if any) power left. This is true even if I make it a point to fully charge it before powering off.

As an experiment I removed the battery and let it and the laptop sit separately for a few days, then plugged the battery in and turned it on, and the charge was close to full. So it seems that shut down is not really turning everything off inside (???).

I have tried the Ubuntu Shut Down and also gone into the terminal and used "sudo init 0".

My main question is whether this is a known problem with this laptop, or with Ubuntu, or maybe the Linux drivers aren't up to snuff? If the consensus is that I just have some hardware problem, that's fine. I just wanted some closure on this annoyance. As I said, I like the laptop in general and got it at a good price. Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

[Dave8671]

Powered down there is no way the battery can be drained by the hardware unless there is a hardware malfunction. I checked specs for the laptop and it looks that it has a AMD R5 graphics card can drain battery fast than intel graphics cards.

Here is what i suggest open synaptic package manager [ if not installed install it]
Install TLP which is a power management software for linux. Linux in general has always had problems with battery management. TLP is a command line tool it works for most systems. Below is the links for TLP I suggest reading it. It has commands to check power level etc.

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html#features

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html#commands

If this does not help you can recalibrate the battery. Maybe the battery has issues like dead cells?

 

[legacyprog]

Thanks very much Dave, I installed the Ubuntu 16.06 version of TLP and ran tlp-stat -b. I gather TLP tweaks things in the background to minimize drain, so I let it run for a little while after fully charging. The laptop is now sitting on my desk powered off (via sudo init 0) and I will turn it on again tomorrow and see what TLP says then. It was almost but not fully charged when turned off.

As you can imagine, this kind of thing will take me days to investigate, and I probably also should re-do my experiment where I remove the battery during power off times and "prove" (or disprove) that there is some drain even in shutdown. I realize you doubt that, and that's OK, this is the kind of thing I'd rather be wrong.

If I can verify that TLP helped in my particular instance I will come back here and mark as solution. In any case, thanks!

 

[legacyprog]

Final update on this. I kept a log of the times I turned the laptop off and on (6 times) over the course of the first week, and then between August 6th and today August 27th (3 weeks) I purposely did not touch it. On the 6th when I powered off it said 68%, when I powered on today it said 3% (it stayed on just long enough for me to see that in the status line).

During the first week when I would turn it on there would be a slight reduction in battery %, which I assumed was what had been consumed powering down and/or powering up. That is how it went from 100% to 68% in the first week (I mean, it also went down via my usage, but there was also unaccounted for differences between power off and power on % in my log).

So I suspect that this is a hardware problem either in the battery or the laptop. Or maybe some of kind of circuit watching for network wake up requests (???) or the fact that this was a Windows machine which I dual booted (and only use) as a Linux laptop. I realize those last two theories of mine are far fetched.

Mainly I just wanted to know if anyone else had experienced this with this model, and it appears that is a big no. So I will live with it and/or see if buying a different battery makes any difference.

Thanks for your help Dave.