This Is Why Your Laptop Battery Dies Fast

Quick, what is the biggest drain on your laptop's battery? If you answered "the display," you are right -- for the most part. The single biggest occupier of battery resources, day in and day out, is your laptop's display. More specifically, it's the that energy goes into powering the backlight that illuminates the pixels on your laptop's display. The obvious move to extend battery life is then to lower your display's brightness. On either a Windows 10 laptop or an Apple MacBook, you can usually do this on the keyboard, but there are a couple other settings to change that will help automate the process. Open System Preferences and click Display. On the Display tab, you will see a slider for Brightness. Lower it to a point between super bright and depressingly dull. Not only will a display set at a lower brightness aid your battery life, but it will also be easier on your eyes unless you are sitting in direct sunlight and need brightness at its max in order to see text and images. Below the slider is a check box for Automatically adjust brightness, which may or may not help extend the life of your battery. If you use your laptop primarily in a brightly lit office or sunny breakfast nook, then keep this setting off so OS X is not bumping up screen brightness to compensate for your bright environment. You are better off lowering the display brightness manually. Of course, the opposite is also true. If you often work into the wee hours at night in a darkened room or keep your office light low, check the box and let OS X lower the brightness in such settings. There is another display-related setting on the Energy Saver area of System Preferences. Check the box for Slightly dim the display while on battery power. Keeping your display running while your laptop sits unattended is a needless waste of battery resources. On the Energy Saver page, you can set times for Computer Sleep and Display Sleep, both of which spring into action if your MacBook sits idle for a period of time. Set as short a time as you are comfortable with for the Battery tab; it's less important for the Power Adapter tab. First off, if you are concerned about your Windows 10 laptop's battery life, head to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options and make sure you choose a Balanced or Power Saver plan. Use the High performance plan only when you need a boost for gaming or high-end graphics apps. With Windows 10, there are additional power and display settings from the Settings button on the Windows 10 start screen. Tap the Home button, tap the Settings button on the left edge, and then tap System. From the left menu, tap Display and you will find a slider for Adjust brightness level. Next, tap Battery Saver from the left menu. Tap the toggle switch to turn on Battery saver. If the toggle switch is grayed out, unplug your laptop so it's running on battery power and the toggle switch will become active. Battery saver is a new feature with Windows 10 that limits background activity and push notifications to extend battery life. By default, Battery saver turns on when your battery falls below 20 percent. Tap Battery saver settings to adjust this percentage. Also on the Battery saver settings page, you can check a box for Lower screen brightness while in battery saver to further extend battery life. Lastly, tap Power & sleep from the left menu and select times for Windows 10 to turn the screen off and put your PC in sleep mode to avoid needlessly draining your battery while your laptop sits idle. For more, read about Window 10's built-in battery-saving mode. Similar to powering the display backlight, powering keyboard backlights can also be a big drain on your battery. First, make sure you turn off your keyboard backlights when you do not need them. Secondly, both OS X and Windows 10 have settings that will kill keyboard backlights after the laptop sits idle for a time of your choosing. This setting varies by manufacturer with Windows 10, but on OS X, you will find it in System Preferences > Keyboard. While the display is the primary culprit for draining your laptop's battery, I still want to leave you with two pieces of tried-and-true battery life advice. 1. Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when they are not needed. Both wireless adapters use battery power to scan for networks and devices and keep you connected. 2. Unplug any peripherals when they are not in use. An unpowered peripheral draws power from your laptop, which means it will drain the battery when the laptop is not plugged in.

1. i ask again, how much electricity is required to split a liter of water into H2 and O2 gases.?

Your idea about electrons is wrong. What the electrolysis is doing is moving the electrons from the anode and giving them to the cathode. There is no net gain in electrons so you do not need to take any extra electrons. The electrons are given a voltage and this makes them move thus making a current. This requires energy. It depends on the efficiency of your electrolysis method and most of them are not efficient at all. Overall your efficiency will be less than 50%. So half of the energy you started off with is lost in heat. So you start with $2 of battery power and you get $1 of hydrogen power. Its a long time since I did chemistry so I may be a bit wrong! This is how many electrons needed for a litre of water: There are 18g per mole. A litre is about 1kg. So there are 55.55 moles in a litre. Each molecule takes 2 electrons. So you would need 111 moles of electrons. Times that by Avogadro's constant 6.02210^23 and you get 6.6810^25 electrons. Quite a lot! A more useful measure is the power required for this task. Now the enthalpy of water is -273.13kJ per mole. So I make that -111*273.13 for the litre or near enough -2.67MJ. But since the efficiency is going to be about half the energy required will be 5.3MJ. So the answer to the question "how much electricity" converted into more usual units is about 1.4kWH. Oh, and pure H2O hardly conducts at all. I expect that your H2O was not as pure as you thought.

2. Will my car battery power my CPAP machine all night on a camping trip? (Power Consumption?)?

First, will there be another car there with a jumper cable to start your car if you drain the battery? Second, will you run the engine or make trips between uses for the CPAP machine (and how far is the nearest gas station?) A 12 volt car battery rated for 40Ah (amp-hours) will last 40 hours at 1 amp or 1 hour at 40 amps (limited by fuses?). A fully charged battery should last about 40/3 = 13.3 hours in theory for a 3 amp 12VDC load. But leave yourself some margin, especially if the CPAP machine is sensitive to voltage droop.

3. USB mouse cuts out on battery power

It seems like your computer is set to disable USB when iddle as a power saving measure.This is usually suggested by powertop, but it's a very bad idea if you are using a USB mouse. This command fixes it temporally:You need to substitute yourmouse for your mouse bus and device number, you can usually find it with:Unluckily this will work only until whatever the program that have changed the setting kicks on again: either at boot time, when you disconnect your computer from electricity, or whatever. You need to discover what package is changing it to resolve the issue