Resolved Battery drained while using charger: no low battery warning

[w5jck]

I’m using a MacBook Air M1 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD. It basically stays on my desk plugged into a 65w charger. I’ve had it for a few months now, and no issues until this morning. I rarely run it on battery power. It has been continuously plugged into the charger for at least the past month, and the battery usually stays around 80% charged since I use the optimize option. This morning started out as usual with awakening the MacBook Air M1 and using it. I was exporting about 1,000 large TIFF files from Lightroom when I noticed that the MacBook Air M1 was getting rather sluggish. It never gets sluggish. I honestly never thought to check the battery level since it was on the charger. The MacBook Air M1 eventually shut down. I NEVER received any low battery warning, which makes me angry. Not sure why the battery drained, perhaps the charger or USB-C port was acting up, but they have never done that in the past. I unplugged the MacBook Air M1, plugged in a different charger and it charged up fairly fast and started working again. I then unplugged that charger and replugged in the one I normally use and it continued charging. Everything seems back to normal. This is the kind of thing which occasionally happened with my older MacBook Pro because the magnetic charger was so easy to disconnect without noticing, but I always got a low battery warning under Mojave.

That brings me to my question. How the heck do you set up a low battery warning in Monterey? I can’t find anything within Settings that will do this. After googling it seems a lot of people are not getting low battery warnings, and no one seems to know how to set it up to get one.

I’m not concerned about the sudden battery drain issue this morning as that was likely an issue with the charger or something outside of the MacBook Air M1. BTW, Monterey is up to date with the latest updates. But I do want to figure out how to get a low battery warning. That tiny battery icon in the Menu bar is of little value since it is so small, and when running with charger connected I never worried about it anyway. Preferably I would like to know if the battery drops down to 20% or less since it is usually plugged into the charger. That would give me enough warning to see why ut isn’t staying charged and correct that issue. Besides, I don’t like dropping below 20% on any battery for any device.

 

[Jim Lahey]

Seems like bad calibration behaviour on the face of it. The Mac will go into deep sleep when it detects the battery is critically low, even if it isn’t really and it’s plugged into an outlet. This has happened to me at about 50% charge without warning. Took a couple of calibration cycles 100>0>100 to restore normal functioning.

 

[w5jck]

Seems like bad calibration behaviour on the face of it. The Mac will go into deep sleep when it detects the battery is critically low, even if it isn’t really and it’s plugged into an outlet. This has happened to me at about 50% charge without warning. Took a couple of calibration cycles 100>0>100 to restore normal functioning.

Maybe, but the battery was down to showing only a small red line on the graphic. It didn’t display a percentage until I switched chargers and it charged up enough to come back on. It was around 14% when I finally saw a percentage read out, so I don’t think it was a false reading like many people have experienced. I think it basically stopped charging and then the battery naturally drained. Whatever it was, there should have been a low battery warning in plenty of time to allow me to check the connections to the charger and prevent a shutdown.

In Monterey, Apple did away with the Energy panel in Settings, which is where you used to set a low battery warning. I’m really getting tired of all of Apple’s moronic and unnecessary changes which just give us headaches. If it frigging works, they should leave it alone and not mess with it. Like Sheldon always said on “Big Bang”, ”What new fresh hell is this?” I find myself asking that all the time with Apple’s OS updates…

 

[Jim Lahey]

Worth remembering that the big graphic that appears onscreen when you’re trying to revive a Mac from deep sleep will show an empty battery even if it isn’t really. At least that is my experience. But yes your situation sounds odd. Possibly it stopped charging and was simultaneously slightly out of calibration. Not sure about being able to set a manual battery level warning. I’ve never come across that in more than a decade of owning MacBooks.

 

[G5isAlive]

https://www.***************/low-battery-warning-does-not-display-on-mac/

This seems to suggest you need to turn on the show battery option in the menu bar via the battery gadget in preferences.

 

[w5jck]

https://www.***************/low-battery-warning-does-not-display-on-mac/

This seems to suggest you need to turn on the show battery option in the menu bar via the battery gadget in preferences.

I already had that turned ON.

 

[w5jck]

Well the battery level is starting to drop again this morning. The MacBook Air M1 is plugged in, and the Battery icon in the Menu shows the charging symbol but when I click on it is says "Battery is not charging". If I open Battery Preferences it says the battery is charging, but it shows the level of charge slowly dropping. Something is definitely messed up.

 

[w5jck]

Okay I think I resolved the charging issue. The 3rd party 65w USB-C power supply I was using apparently reached a point wherein it could no longer reliably charge my MacBook Air M1. Strange since I had used it from first getting the MacBook Air M1 until yesterday (about 4 months) without any issues. I replaced it with a different 3rd party 65w USB-C power supply and everything seems to be back to normal. As you can see from the attached screen capture, the replacement PS is now actually charging the MacBook Air M1 battery. I will monitor it closely the next several days and make sure it continues to work properly.

BTW, The 65w USB-C power supply I stopped using with the MacBook Air M1 is working fine with my iPad Air 2020. There was something about charging the MacBook Air M1 though that made it not able to do so any more.