How to Generate a Battery Health Report in Windows 10

What is a Charging Cycle?

All batteries can only be charged a finite number of times. The action of discharge and recharging a battery is called a cycle. A cycle is counted when the battery is discharged and charged at or over 100% of capacity. For example, the battery at 100% is discharged to 15% then fully charged is a cycle. A battery at 100% discharged down to 75% then fully charged is not a complete cycle, but doing that 4 times is. Batteries can generally only support around 800-1000 cycles before they start to degrade. Depending on the type of battery this can be less overall charge, meaning you run out of power quicker or the battery may not hold charge with the device off. In extreme cases the battery may start to swell or even burst.

How to generate a Battery Report in Windows 10

In the Windows system, there is a great power management tool that allows you to learn more about your battery information and behavior over time. The report is called "Battery Report".

1. Right-click on the Start menu to bring up the menu
2. Command Prompt (Admin)
3. Copy and paste powercfg /batteryreport /output "%UserProfile%\Desktop\battery_report.html"
4. On your desktop you should see a file labeled battery_report.html, double click to open

The battery health report is made up of a few different sections. The first shows details such as the computer name and Windows versions. The next section lists the battery or batteries if you have more than one. You can see the type of battery, commonly LiP for Lithium Polymer or LION for Lithium Ion. Most importantly you can see the battery design capacity and the calculated full charge capacity. These give an indication of the overall battery health.

You can also see recent battery usage, when the battery charges and discharges and various statistics about the battery capacity history. You can see from this screenshot of my report that my Surface Book 2 has two batteries. The first isn't looking too bad, however the second is showing a drop in full charge capacity of about 20% which is something I'm going to have to keep an eye on. You can also see the cycle count for the battery, although I believe that is since the OS install not the entire life of the battery, so if you reset your Windows 10 laptop to factory settings this will revert to zero.

How to Minimize Battery Wear

There are several things you can do to help prolong the life of your laptop battery and there are things you can do that will accelerate the deterioration of your battery capacity.

The first and most important thing is to use the device as normal and do not worry about discharging or re-charging the battery regularly. The device is designed to be used and batteries will last at least 5 years through heavy use and much longer in lighter use. The 20% degradation you see on my battery health report is over two and a half years worth of heavy usage, I use it for work, gaming and writing. It's in use over 12 hours per day plugged in or using battery.

However, keeping your device on charger all the time without allowing it to discharge, will eventually burn your battery.

Also do not let your device run out of charge and leave it for too long as the battery may go on a deep discharge that you can't recover from. If you're storing the device for a prolonged period of time you should charge the battery to roughly 50% and store it like that.

How to Check Which Apps use the Most Power?

You can see which apps are consuming the most power on Windows 10 or Windows 11 by going into the Settings > System > Battery applet. You can also hit the Windows Key and type Battery and click the app from the search results.

This app will allow you to see current battery level and status, enable battery saver and see Battery usage per app over 24 hours or a week. It will only show apps when you are on battery, nothing will show when plugged into a charger, and it won't work on desktops without battery.

How to Generate a Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report

The energy report is a little more technical than the Battery applet above. This report runs over a short time and analyses not just applications but all processes including drivers which may be out of date or misconfigured. There is a possibility to get information of how much energy is consumed by them and it will give hints as to any applications running in the background that uses a lot of power, and if you don't use or need it, you can uninstall it to gain extra battery life.

Open Command Prompt as Administrator and enter the following commands.

powercfg -energy /output "%UserProfile%\Desktop\energy-report.html

After a minute the report will be generated on your desktop. You can run a longer report to gather additional profiling statistics using the /duration switch followed by the number of seconds to run. 60 is the default, you can use 120 for two minutes.

powercfg -energy /duration 120 /output "%UserProfile%\Desktop\energy-report.html

C:\WINDOWS\system32>powercfg -energy /output "%UserProfile%\Desktop\battery_report.html
Enabling tracing for 60 seconds...
Observing system behavior...
Analyzing trace data...
Analysis complete.

Energy efficiency problems were found.

5 Errors
24 Warnings
69 Informational

See C:\Users\ttrott\Desktop\battery_report.html for more details.

The report sections will show you any erros in the power settings, warning and informational messages. In my case I could see from the report that there were a number of issues to fix. Some of which I list below, you may have different issues to address.

1. Power Policy:Sleep timeout is disabled (Plugged In)
2. USB Suspend:USB Device not Entering Selective Suspend
3. CPU Utilisation:Processor utilisation is high
4. Devices with missing or misconfigured drivers can increase power consumption. - PANGP Virtual Ethernet Adapter
5. CPU Utilisation:Individual process with significant processor utilisation.

The report will also show information about various settings in the current power plan, usually a balanced personality from the device manufacturer, and it could give some hints as to a few settings you can optimise.