Problems with laptop battery not charging and charging only up to a certain value

General Help
1

Hey there,

not sure if I should post this in the hardware subforum or here. I hope I picked the right forum :wink:

I recently switched from Win 11 to Zorin on my slowly aging Thinkpad X1 Carbon 5th gen (i5 7th gen, 8gb ram, NVME ssd, no discrete GPU). So far - I love it! But there's one thing which bugs me. My battery didn't want to charge. At all. But only when using zorin, back in windows it's charging just fine. It's pretty weak in general and didn't last for an hour under windows but it not charging at all is weird.

When I go to the battery settings menu, I see discharging w/o the charger attached. When I attach it, it says "not charging" and it indeed keeps discharging.

I googled and found similar problems here and there, but they all appear to be model specific (like certain HP and Acer notebooks are known to have problems with their charging circuitry etc.) and someone who also has a X1 carbon 5th gen like me, was able to resolve the issue, but his solution didn't work for me (more down below)

I stumbled upon this thread:

when I ran upower just like in this thread, I had a very similar output.

I tried the fix in the first answer on this page by disabling the battery in the bios. This helped - But just once. The laptop was charging, but it didn't charge past (I think) 59%. After a reboot, it once again didn't want to charge at all.

Since the battery was pretty weak (total capacity according to upower below 70%), I replaced it yesterday with a known good, albeit off brand one. Good news - battery lasts MUCH longer, but now the system won't charge past 69%. I think this number is way off, since it stays at 69% for about an hour, before goig below that value.

What can I do about that? When I switch back to Win 11 (dual boot), it charges to 100% without any issues and lasts quite a while (also because the aftermarket battery has a higher capacity than the original, Lenovo one).

Thanks and kind regards!

2

Just did a websearch using "Thinkpad X1 Carbon battery not charging Ubuntu 24.04"
found this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1513325/thinkpad-charging-issues-in-ubuntu-24-04
Don't know if any help. Suggests try a different kernel.
Also read there is a bug report: Bug #2067043 “Wrong Battery Reading after Wake from S3 Sleep sin...” : Bugs : linux package : Ubuntu

3

Thanks for the links! But as far as I can see (or rather understood this issue), it was related to a kernel bug which should have been fixed in kernel 6.10 RC5 onward and since I'm running Zorin 18 core, my kernel is 6.14.0-33-generic, so - newer. My Linux knowledge is somewhat limited - I mostly used it on servers, headless. I know my way around but besides som early tests around 2015 or so, I never really used any Linux distro as a daily driver.

I googled a bit more and found out, that the battery sensor might need to be calibrated, so I discharged the notebook until it shut down and I'm currently charging it. I hope I might be able to charge it to 100% now. I'll keep you posted.

4

That is always a good idea and easy to do if battery percentage is clearly wrong and charging errors. Just not too often with Li ion batteries as they do not like full discharges.

5

You can try checking your battery settings and updating the power drivers. Sometimes the issue comes from charging thresholds set in BIOS. If it still doesn’t charge properly, get it checked by a professional.