What factors impact battery energy life? Does operating a computer in indoor versus outdoor environments have a significant impact on the computer's battery life?

First, what is our definition of battery energy life? Battery life is the amount of time a fully charged battery provides power to operate the computer. Now addressing the question, there are many factors that influence battery energy life and yes, outdoor environments add another layer of complexity. This blog post identifies some of the key elements to consider when calculating battery energy life in your usage model and environment.

Environmental Factors:

If working in temperatures below -20°C, the battery chemistry is less effective and unable to supply the same voltage level. This results in lower reduced energy supply from the battery. In some instances, you may find you can increase the effective battery life by using more power, which causes more heat to be generated by the computer and by the process of discharging the battery. Doing this will effectively warm the battery and help to counteract some of the effects of cold weather on the battery chemistry. Your mileage may vary.

Processing Load:

Are you typing notes, or running a graphics intensive application like GIS mapping? The harder the processor works, the quicker the battery gets consumed. Expect less battery energy life if your workflow focuses on mapping versus data collection forms.

System settings:

Display Brightness: If the display brightness is set to 100 for readability in full sunlight, expect significantly less battery time than if the display is set at default or lower for low light conditions.

Power setting: Expect less battery energy life if your power setting is set to High Performance verses Balanced or Power Saver. If battery energy life is a concern, consider taking a performance hit and select Power Saver. The computer will have slower response, but you will have more power to stretch processing ability through a long day.

Internal and External Devices:

Cellular data modem:

• Signal Quality: WWAN signal quality can significantly impact the battery. If the signal is marginal, the modem will consume more power to boost the signal to make contact with the cell tower.
• Data Transfer Rate: More packets transferred means more power consumed. 3G data transfer rate is higher than Edge, giving the appearance that 3G takes more power to operate. In reality, with 3G data service, more data is transferred in less time but energy is also consumed faster.
• Receive or Push: If your workflow primarily pushes data, you will run out of battery power faster than someone primarily receiving data. Receiving takes less power than sending.

Radios: Are radios off or are you transferring data via WiFi or Bluetooth most of the time?

GPS Receiver: Any time you have an application open that accesses the GPS receiver COM port, the GPS receiver will be active. If you have an application open that uses GPS but is often running in the background and not as your primary application, you may be consuming excess power. However, the time spent restarting the application and the cold-start initialization time for the GPS receiver may completely offset any gains in battery life, depending on how many times per day you need GPS positioning data. In general, the power usage of the built-in GPS receiver typically is a bit more than the power usage of Bluetooth and substantially less than the power usage of WiFi or WWAN.

Is the computer stand alone or are you powering external devices such as a scanner, external hard drive or CD/DVD drive, etc.?