5 Tips On How Many Watts To Charge A Laptop?
As laptops became an important part of our daily life, knowing your device has become an essential thing to do. Many people want to know technical information and want answers to their questions about laptop-related technology and one of them is How Many Watts To Charge A Laptop?
Many laptop users are curious about the charging process. They want to know the average power consumption of the laptop and how many watts are needed to charge the device. They also want to figure out the reasons behind power usage in laptops, and how to make your laptop consume less power to save energy.
The answers to all these questions are in this article, so relax and make yourself a cup of coffee or your favorite beverage and read this informative yet light article. So let’s get started.
How Many Watts Does A Laptop Use When Charging?
The most accurate answer to this question is written on your charger. Most laptops have this information so you can have the right answer. But as a general overview, it can be anything from 60 watts to 180 watts per hour. Also, this depends on many factors such as screen brightness, software, and graphics card usage.
For example, a 17-inch gaming laptop would consume 180 Watts an hour because it requires more power than a regular laptop for light use such as browsing.
How Much Power Does A Laptop Use Per Hour?
You may know how many Watts your laptop’s charger needs to run, but your laptop will probably use less power when it is on battery or charging, consuming the maximum amount indicated on the charger, usually about 90 watts.
The actual power usage depends on how you use the laptop. It consumes less power when your device is not being used, while when used for gaming or intensive tasks, it will consume much more power than you would think.
Factors Affecting Power Consumption
Many factors affect the power consumption, it mainly depends on the laptop as our machines now are designed to consume less power than they used to do. But the main factors that you need are those:
- Adapter
- CPU
- Dual graphics-card
- Random Access Memory (RAM).
- Hard disk/SSD
- Module WLAN
- Laptop Fan
- Touchpad
Laptop Adapter
When the laptop is being charged, the power consumption is determined by its charger. Adapters are designed according to inch screens and they are charged based on that.
For example, some regular 15-inch laptops use a 65-watt charger while a 17-inch laptop uses 90 Watts.
As the electricity supply is not interrupted, and your adapter is working properly, these would be the normal numbers.
Central Processing Unit
The core of any computer or laptop, the CPU is definitely one of the main energy consumers in your machine. It is mainly responsible for running the operating system and any application that you can possibly use.
When your CPU gets faster, this will cause the battery life to be less than usual. This can be done through programs that are specifically made to boost the CPU’s performance no matter what is your windows version. But the problem is that the CPU will have to consume so much power to the level that the battery is basically drained.
The adapter provides your laptop the energy in the watts form, then the battery takes the watts and delivers them to the laptop so it would function well. This means that when you put extra load on the CPU, the battery is affected by having more burden than usual. But the power consumption is constant, so the battery’s life span will be the one affected by getting lesser.
Dual graphics card
Anyone who uses heavy applications or software is familiar with battery draining because of them. Graphics cards are what make using any software possible. They enhance the screen resolution and the clarity overall and they support using any visual-related task, and they help running with many software programs.
When using the graphics card intensively, the adapter has to work harder to push the battery to get more energy. And that situation creates such tension between both the battery and the adapter which causes overheating for both eventually, which affects the laptop’s life duration.
Other parts of the Laptop
There are other parts of your laptop that consume energy too such as the screen, loud music, excessive usage of the internet, downloading, and other things. They all put a huge load on the battery and thus the charger.
Using any extra device and connecting it to the laptop will definitely cause more energy consumption, such as a mouse, an external keyboard, speakers, or extra monitors. So if you don’t use an extra device, disconnect it.
How Do I Reduce The Power Consumption?
There are many tips & tricks to use to reduce the power consumption and keep the battery from draining this fast and continue working or performing tasks for long periods of time.
1- Hibernation
When you are not using your laptop for a long amount of time, try not to let it sleep. Instead, make it go into hibernation. This will save you the current state of the laptop and it will be turned off, while in sleep mode, the CPU keeps running some features.
2- Disable Connectivity
When you use the Wi-Fi network, the laptop consumes more power because you do many things such as navigating and downloading. But at other times you will be focusing on writing documents or other offline tasks. At this point, you may not be using your wireless connection, but it still consumes a considerable amount of power. So try to disconnect it whenever possible to make sure that the power is not wasted.
There are some hacks to do if you want to use some websites in offline mode. If you want to consult a specific laptop website regularly, download it to your laptop hard drive while it remains connected to the electrical network. Next time you navigate, you can use the offline mode.
You can do this for emails too. Use an email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird 12 so you can refer to your message history and save more power.
Make sure to disconnect connectivity options such as Bluetooth, infrared, and other routes that also cost additional energy when you are not using them.
3- No Services Or Applications
Disabling programs and some windows features are guaranteed to prolong the battery life. This is also right for sound systems which can be muted by going into the Hardware and Sound section of the Control Panel.
If there is a program you don’t use, close it and don’t leave it running in the background draining your energy such as Live Messenger or Dropbox. Also, make sure that you disable the automatic start by running the MsConfig application through the search box in your Start menu
and accessing the Windows Start tab. Also turning off updates and other heavy programs will run the laptop smoothly, but some modules are essential to auto start.
4- Remove The Hardware
External devices with USB connectivity are a big source of power consumption. If you connect removable disk drives, MP3 players, USB microphones, or any other device, they will be powered by your laptop and they keep consuming energy and draining the battery even without being used.
The best thing to do, especially in the case of DVD or CD or any drive that reads data, is to duplicate it on the hard drive in a folder and remove it.
5- RAM And Hard Disk
The RAM is responsible for running most of the applications and programs. That is why when you open more apps, it will make it slower for the RAM to do its job. Consider adding additional RAM memory if you usually use many apps at the same time. Also, consider closing anything you don’t use as it consumes energy in the background.
How to calculate Watts Consumed by a Laptop?
1. Manual Calculation
You can calculate your watts consumption manually by adding up the power required to charge it (adapter laptop wattage). But other factors should be taken into account if you need a more accurate calculation.
Let’s take an example. The Acer Predator Laptop has a charging adapter that consumes 180 watts per hour. The two things that consume the most are The CPU and GPU.
In most laptop systems, you will find an Intel processor, NVIDIA graphics cards, or AMD. you can know the exact number by searching the official website as it includes all the necessary information, or you can check the back panel by yourself to be sure.
The power consumption range for a processor is between 45W and 50W, while a GPU is between 75W and 80W. The two components can both increase the power consumption of a laptop by over 10-15%, but it is an average percentage that varies a lot.
For the screen brightness, it usually consumes between 0.5W and 15W per hour at maximum brightness. But you need to take into account the other factors such as SSD/HDD, and RAM.
So you can realize that the manual calculation is not very practical, and you can just approximate the number.
2. Electricity Usage: The Calculation
The second and more practical option is to use an Electricity Usage Monitor. The device is usually connected to the power socket, and then it informs you about how many watts your laptop used during charging. It is very convenient as the monitor displays the total power consumption that includes all the factors.
It works this way, stick the device to the wall socket and plug in the charger, then your charger will start reading how much power it is drawing from the socket. Normally, it would show 60W, which is the power the charger was built with. Once the battery is fully charged, you can determine how much power the laptop consumes from its battery and the components.
You can also use it to determine the total power consumption of the laptop over the time it has been in use.
This is a very useful device that you can easily purchase online or through local stores to learn more about your machine.
Frequently Asked Questions Of How Many Watts To Charge A Laptop
Does a laptop consume less energy than a PC?
Laptops have many more components than PCs, that is why they consume less power. A variety of laptop types consume more power than the average laptop.
Is the Laptop Wattage Differ for different brands such as Acer, Dell, ASUS, HP, etc.?
The same watt rules apply whether you have laptops from Dell, HP, Razer Blade, Lenovo, Acer, MSI, ASUS, etc. For laptops with similar specs from two different manufacturers, the power consumption won’t be this different as it depends on the components themselves.
How many watts does a laptop use per hour?
If a laptop is being used, it will consume between 50 and 100 watts per hour. For a regular eight-hour day, 150-300 kWh of power is consumed, and 44-88 kg of CO2 is emitted. But less power is used in standby mode.
Final Thoughts
We have discussed many things regarding laptop power consumption in our article. We have shown you what affects power usage and how to control it to use less energy. We also established that using a third-party device is better than figuring it out manually, and how to do it the right way.
We hope you have known more about your laptop, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to comment your inquiries, good luck!
