Short Battery Life Envy 13 ad173cl

[gnusmag45]

Hello,

Iv'e recently purchased the aformentioned model, on which i get an average of 4:30 hours of battery life on a balanced power plan, screen at 25% illumination, and doing very light web browsing with a couple of tabs opened on Chrome. As per task manager, there is no process that is using any significant % of the CPU.

I cannot find information about this laptop anywhere except for this:

https://support.hp.com/ph-en/document/c05787837

I don't even have an idea of what HP is claiming the battery life od this model should be, so i have nothing to compare it to.

It's also very hard to find reviews of this particular configuration, is there anyone here with the same configuration that could shed some light on the matter?

Thank you

[Huffer]

3 cell battery so 4.5 hours is well within the normal range. 

[gnusmag45]

How did you come up with the fact that it's reasonable?

Both the older model and the newer model have roughly the same battery, and HP claims are 12-14 hours of battery life.

For some reason i cannot find any information about my specific configuration, but one of the selling points of the Envy 13 supposed to be the long battery life, and i seriously doubt that in between 2 models with 12-14 hours battery life, HP will sudenly drop a laptop of the same series with such a low batery life.

[Huffer]

I've used lots of laptops and answered thousands of questions here for over 20 years and we frequently get folks who (justifiably, I think) complain about the disconnect between marketing hype and actual performance on battery life. You assume that the "claim" of 12-14 hours has any basis in reality. Have you ever had a laptop that had 12-14 hours of battery runtime? Neither have I. Some small subnotebooks with little screen, weak processor, maybe 7-8 hours or so. 

i7 processor, 16 gigs RAM, 4k screen, dedicated graphics chip, 3 cell battery. You have all the features that work against long battery runtime. 

[gnusmag45]

obviously i dont expect 12-14 hours out of these models, but reviews for the older and the newer models showed that 8-9 hours of battery life on these models is quite normal...so 4.5 hours sounds rather low.

Maybe there is some setting that I'm missing, or any other information that is relevant to getting the most out of the battery to achieve at least  7 hours of moderate use.

[Huffer]

Here is a review:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Envy-13t-i7-8550U-MX150-SSD-FHD-Laptop-Review.337704.0.html

Notice the tested laptop was a FHD and you have a 4K. This makes a huge difference as a 4K screen has 4 times the number of pixels of a FHD. 

"The biggest reason to skip a 4K display is battery life. It's unlikely you'll be doing any gaming or photo editing for long on battery alone with any laptop. But the higher-resolution panels put a hurt on battery life. And I'm not talking minutes, but hours in reduced run time."

https://www.cnet.com/news/five-reasons-to-get-a-4k-laptop-and-one-big-reason-to-stay-away/

[gnusmag45]

It absolutely makes sense that the 4K variant will use more energy, but i still expect it to do better than 4.5 hours on this model.

I read a lot of reviews of other models from HP or other companies on which there are 4K variants of the reviwed model compared to their FHD siblings, and there was always a difference of some sort in battery life, but it was never "the 4K has half the battery life of the FHD variant", at least not with models from the last 2 years.

I'm still waiting for an HP representative so provide me the official information and claims for this variant.

[Huffer]

Make a warranty claim if you wish to communicate directly with HP. This is a User to User Forum. Good luck.