Steam Deck gets a Battery Charge Limit control in the latest Beta

I find a mix of heat and isopropyl alcohol (at least 70%, though I prefer 99% if I'm working inside an electronic since it evaporates quickly and is less likely to cause a short due to residual liquid when you're done with the repair. Do note that 99% will likely require you to use more alcohol overall and may not be ideal.) works best to remove adhered batteries. I would say using a heating pad is a safer option than a heat gun in most cases (if set to about 72-76 degrees Fahrenheit, for about 10-15 minutes). Usually you lay the device face down (never put it on where the battery is directly touching the heating pad, too much heat can cause the battery to catch fire or explode) to loosen up the adhesive. All that being said I'm not sure how well it would work with the steam deck though since the control sticks make it hard to lay down flat, plus I don't know how the heat will affect the screen (most devices like phones are usually fine as long as it's not too hot and not too long).

If the battery is expanding you should probably not use heat and just isopropyl alcohol as inflating batteries are more at risk to catch fire or explode. If you can't, or don't want to use heat then you can just use the alcohol to slowly pick away at it, but it's going to require more patience and take longer. Also you're more likely to tear up the plastic card you're using to get the battery out.

can the adhesive be dissolved with solvent? or does it need to be with done with a heat gun?

The iFixit Guide to replace the battery on an Steam Deck (OLED)

TL;DR: Mostly screws, but the battery itself is adhered in with several adhesive strips. Be careful if you follow this guide at home as using too much heat can damage the device and/or the battery.

In summary: No, it's not that easy to replace. As someone who fixes a lot of electronics I hate this practice of adhering batteries (much less anything replaceable) into a device.

IIRC it's glued in, and there might be other barriers beyond that

IDK about non issue. I have a framework laptop, and even though the battery is very easily replaceable, I still set the charge limit to 80%.

I don't require the extra charge the majority of the time, and now I don't have to worry about replacing my battery for a much longer period of time.

Though I agree, for as serviceable as the steam deck is, a little more attention could've been paid to the battery situation.

I thought the steam deck battery wasn't too hard to replace? As long as you can handle a screwdriver.

Actually thanks, now trust you mention it i should not have used safe.

I was not meaning danger, just that i might have damaged the battery life or at least put it at risk at the least. Just assumed that it came optimised to be as ideal as valve usually goes a bit overboard on their hardware from what i remember reading

Well unless you bought one of those electric bike conversion kits from Temu. Those might.

There’s a big difference between “safe” and “ideal”

All lithium ion batteries degrade quicker at 100% vs 80 or even 60%. But it’s not going to explode and kill you.

I think since the beginning if plugged in for some time it decharges to 95% so you are probably fine. You can check the battery health in desktop mode.

Decky has a Powertools plugin, what I've been doing, can set per game profiles and restrict charge rates as well with that.

It was already an option in desktop mode afaik, just wasn't part of game mode.

Also I literally can't get it to use a plugged controller when docked. Sure, it will charge it and I can pair it with Bluetooth and it works, but it's a little silly that I can't just use it as "pure" USB controller (even though it works flawlessly in that way on multiple PCs, including a Linux desktop, and through weird peripherals like my monitor's USB hub).

Streaming games on the home wifi is also basically non-functional in the OS, even though it works pretty damn well when I do it through Moonlight. I'm assuming the steam version doesn't do enough compression (and yes I have tried tweaking the settings)

It’s so weird that it doesn’t have it because both my kubuntu and endeavorOS installs have it by default. Like that’s a basic feature

I do hope they focus a bit on the UI going forward - we've noticed a lot of silly little bugs while either using the Steam Deck controls or a controller.

A little hard to close a window without focus when using a controller....

This is incorrect.

Huh

I think the amd_p_state is not available on any Zen 2.

Interesting. I have always felt that the Steam deck loses quite a bit of battery percentage during sleep. I agree that it would be a fantastic quality of life update to enable to shut down or enter some form of lower power consumption hibernation state after a period of time at a certain battery level.

It's a custom chip though isn't it? Seems a strange choice

Almost no modern device does a traditional S1-3 sleep. They all do S0 standby/modern standby in windows 8+ parlance. The system is on the entire time. So “waking up” to go to hibernate is basically the same as doing it from a normal on state.

That's basically what hibernate is. Shouldn't be hard to offer as an option.

The difficult bit is having it wake from sleep to hibernate itself. I suspect that would require hardware.

Hibernate would be great as it's a slightly longer restore, but should work the same (if you are willing g to sacrifice the disk space)

Being able to pick up the deck and know it will have battery left would be really nice. It drains pretty fast in sleep mode.

It can’t dump a save state to disk? I guess that would be difficult on a normal OS.

The problem is that the Steam Deck APU doesn't support amd_p_state and you need to rely on auto_cpufreq. This explains why the power consumption in sleep is so high.

I personally wouldn't want that, at least not if it's on a game.

Sparky1337 hasn't said anything about how long it had been plugged in before he saw it at 95%, so I was kinda assuming he was leaving it plugged in overnight, or leaving it docked for long amounts of time.

Battery self discharge is measured in days at worst, more typically weeks or months. It should not be dropping 5% over the course of an hour or so even if the device is a bit warm. Plus having it plugged in should start charging again once the battery starts dropping too low.

Not quite - batteries have something called self-discharge, which happens faster at higher temps. If you're actively using the deck, it can get warm which speeds up this process. It's not fast, but it's absolutely possible to see depending on how long you leave the deck docked

You shouldn't see the battery drop if it is not using the battery, which is what pass through would suggest.

When it charges up all the way, it stops charging and just does passthrough power instead. You can then see the battery % slowly drop over time, which is probably why you were seeing stuff like 95%

I thought the steam deck already had this. Admittedly, I’ve only had mine for about a month, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it charge to 100%. I think 95% was the highest I’ve seen. It seemed like it had something similar to smart charge like Windows has.

On my devices where it’s available I usually set it to 80-85%.

Default limit when toggled on is 80%, which generally seems like a good middle ground between usability and battery life. You can also raise the limit higher if you want more battery, or lower if you want to preserve the battery life better.

Plugged in 24/7? I’d set it to 60%. If I have a mix of use 80%.

... do you know how batteries work? Or how they degrade?

I mean, 80% corresponding to X mAh battery capacity. It will stay at that value for much longer.

Consider two decreasing lines, one with a slightly lower slope. Now imagine the steeper line starting higher on this graph, eventually the lines will cross and despite starting lower the shallower line will be higher.

Why do you reply to a deleted comment?

The Deck automatically stops charging and let's the battery drain to around 95% when plugged in anyway.

What about only charging to 80% until I actually go on a road trip?

It’s same with electric cars, there is day to day mode and road trip mode.

Short term vs long term gains.

The logic isn't flawed, your priors are. You're assuming that people are constantly on a cycle of charging their battery to the limit, running it down low, and then charging it again. If you mostly play docked or with a charger plugged in then capping the battery at around 80% prolongs the battery runtime for when you do turn the limit off and want to use the full battery.

If you mostly play fully charged and stationary, then lowering the charge limit means you have more future opportunities to experience the fully battery runtime when you disable the setting.

No, I'm not suffering the consequences I'm fearing now. Having 80% capacity is enough to last me through the day, what I'm fearing is when the capacity drops below 60%, 50% or even less which I can greatly delay by only charging to 80%.

Additionally, I'm not _forever_ stuck at 80%. If I know I will need more capacity, I can always disable the restriction for the next charge.

But this 80% will last a lot longer.

I mean, I was just gonna unplug it at 80 and plug it back it at 40.

Beforehand I couldn’t just leave it cause it would go to 100%.

If your referring to always keeping it plugged in, can’t I cap it at 60% then?

That's less of an issue with devices you use in battery mode all day, but the Deck sits on the docking Station most of the time and constantly getting held at 100%

I think it comes down to driver support. It’s not that the hardware can’t do this, but rather it’s that you need to pass the option to control it all the way up from the lowest levels of the system eventually into user space where you can select an option in settings.

That, and it’s just not the first priority on devices that are generally low-margin.

This has been possible via the BIOS for a while now, but it's long overdue at the OS level. I love that Value keeps adding little QoL improvements to the steam deck, it's turned out to be one of the best pieces of tech I've ever bought.

Finally!!

Still can’t believe some phones don’t have this

Got my hopes up there might be some sleep limit too. Would much prefer if it shuts down/hibernated after being asleep for more than 26 hours (or past a certain battery level)

You know what would have made this a non-issue?

Easily user replaceable batteries.

On top of that we should have standard sizes and mandate that manufacturers use them.

...i just assumed they knew how to keep the battery safe already... My deck has stayed plugged in and docked since i got my projector to use with it..fuuuuuck

I really appreciate this one. Have done this on my other devices too, and while it does cut battery life by a little, your battery health will remain high for considerably longer

I implemented the same on my laptop with tlp. It is actually pretty easy to do so.

What do people set it to?