The Steam Deck is a neat piece of kit, but it’s not perfect. Slowly but surely, Valve has beeniterating on its hardware and softwaresince its 2022 inception, yet there’s lots more to be done. The Deck’s battery, for example, is seemingly about to receive a Battery Charge Limit.
Battery Charge Limit is one of the more important and forward-looking techniques that help keep modern mobile devices’ batteries healthy for long periods. Though it may be surprising to hear that the Steam Deck didn’t have this in place already, the good news is that Valve didn’t just leave all those poor lithium-ion units to the mercy of Linux/SteamOS, as it has supported battery passthrough from day one. You didn’t do anything wrong if you kept your Deck plugged into a charger basically 24/7, in other words. At the same time, the fact that a charge limit is coming should make it even easier to trust your Deck’s battery as it ages.
Your Steam Deck’s battery might stay healthy for longer, if Valve implements the Battery Charge Limit feature
As surprising as it may be, the Steam Deck doesn’t actually have a proper charge limiter in place, and Valve is only just now looking into implementing the feature via a future SteamOS update. The Battery Charge Limit, as it is usually known in mobile phone parlance, makes it so that a given device does not continue to charge past 80% of its total battery charge. This is important because modern lithium-ion batteries degrade over time and thus lose capacity. Keeping them in an optimum charge range (i.e between 20 and 80%) reduces the degradation rate first and foremost, but implementing Battery Charge Limit also adds an additional 20% of extra charge overhead that can be used and drawn upon as capacity is lost over long periods of time. The end result is a healthier battery as the device using it ages, which is obviously a boon for the Steam Deck.
There’s no ETA for when Battery Charge Limit might be released, but everything points to it being in active development at this time. SteamOS 3.7, perhaps?
One of the r/SteamDeck’s resident Linux wizards, NoFly3972, pointed out that you can already force the feature on by running the following Sudo command:
Obviously, you’re implementing this tweak at your own risk, but this is a verified one that many Deck users have been relying onfor years now. Alternatively, you may wish to install the delightful Power ToolsDecky pluginand toggle the “Battery Charge” tweak. Loads of options at your disposal, then, though I certainly understand if you’d prefer to wait for the official feature from Valve itself.
Whatever the case, there’s no reason to worry about using your Steam Deck’s battery in the interim. However, outliers do exist, as always, the battery passthrough feature I mentioned before is a big help by default. If you, too, often play on the Deck while plugged into the wall, battery passthrough makes it so that the Deck stops using the battery after it’s been fully charged. Instead, it uses the charger for power directly, while the battery is almost entirely left out of the picture. It will only resume charging after dropping to 90%, which usually takes a long while.
