Incredibly inaccurate readings - please help

[Matt]

Hey all,

I was using battery bar free (latest version, floating toolbar) for a week and everything was fine. I normally get around 2 hours and fifteen minutes from my battery and BB was reporting that really accurately.

Suddenly, it gives my full lifetime as 58 minutes and gives ridiculously short time remaining estimates. For example, currently I have 35 percent remaining and it's telling me I've got 30 minutes left, despite the fact that under normal usage I will be able to stay on here for 45-50 minutes.

Can anybody help out? This was really good software until I stopped being able to trust it.

[Chris]

If you haven't already, activate your free trial which enables the Pro features include the Battery Profile Graph. You can open the graph and take a look at your battery profile. That'll show you exactly how the time remaining is calculated.

Two things could be going on, 1) there was a sudden change in percentage at some point that will show in the graph, or 2) you were doing some for a few minutes that used considerably more power than normal.

For #1, use the "Browse Percents" checkbox in the Battery Profile Graph to scroll over to 35% and see what it says should be remaining. You should be able to see if there's a place where the time remaining drops quickly if there's a problem. You can resolve that by going to Preferences -> Tools -> Reset battery profile data.

For #2 (or if the time remaining from #1 above doesn't match what you see on the bar), BatteryBar generates a ratio of estimated time to actual time while you use your battery. So if you start doing something that uses more power than usual, BatteryBar will detect that the battery is discharging faster than normal and will adjust the time remaining to compensate for that. So if normally you'd have 45 minutes remaining, but you're watching a movie that's taking 50% more power than normal, you'll see the time remaining drop to less than 30 minutes. That ratio averages out over about 6% battery usage.