Diagnosing battery behaviour on my Lenovo laptop.

[Owen Thomas]

Hello fellow Ubuntu users.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that while my computer was connected to a
main power supply, my battery was not charging. I became concerned with
this enough to call the manufacturer.

After some discussion, it appears that this is a feature of some laptop
batteries: they are programmed at some point not to charge so their life
can be extended - such was the rationale that was put to me by the support
representative.

In the conversation with the representative, I told them that my laptop was
running Ubuntu, and they said that, because I was not running Windows 10,
they could not perform conclusive diagnostics, and so the subject of
installation of Windows 10 was touted as a likely necessary step that would
decide whether this feature-of-some-laptop-batteries was or was not the
cause of the behaviour I was experiencing.

Thankfully, the support rendered did not lead me to do this after I
observed the battery begin charging once more after I left it unplugged
until the battery's capacity drained below 50%. The battery is now fully
charged and my laptop is (as it always was) operating without a problem.

While I was trying to understand what was going on, I found the "upower"
Ubuntu CLI command. Running upower on this laptop while it was plugged in
gave me the following output while I was experiencing the aforementioned
feature:

owen at owen-Yoga-Slim-7-Pro-14ACH5:~$ upower -i
/org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0
  native-path:          BAT0
  vendor:               Sunwoda
  model:                L19D4PH3
  serial:               55478
  power supply:         yes
  updated:              Fri 25 Aug 2023 14:38:24 (59 seconds ago)
  has history:          yes
  has statistics:       yes
  battery
    present:             yes
    rechargeable:        yes
    state:               pending-charge
    warning-level:       none
    energy:              52.76 Wh
    energy-empty:        0 Wh
    energy-full:         54.86 Wh
    energy-full-design:  61 Wh
    energy-rate:         0 W
    voltage:             17.209 V
    charge-cycles:       200
    percentage:          96%
    capacity:            89.9344%
    technology:          lithium-polymer
    icon-name:          'battery-full-charging-symbolic'

The only indication I can see with this output that might indicate the
presence of a charging feature is the value of "pending-charge" against the
battery state label. So, I am still a little curious as to whether this
command gives me all I need to know about what the battery is doing, and,
if not, is there anything else I can do to dig deeper. Perhaps, should
something similar occur again,  I can avoid discussion of Windows 10
installation if I can disclose more conclusive information.

Thanks,

  Owen.
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