Lack of Charging Documentation.

[zBeeble]

So ... I understand PD charging. I have a PD dock. In reply to this, don't mention PD charging. I know.

Now... here's the situation. I have an Anker multi-port charger by the bed upstairs. Tablets, watches, phones ... even the reading light hanging over my comfy chair all run from the anker chargers. It delivers a total of 80W, but a maximum of 20W per port --- so it will fast charge up to 3 devices ... and when a device rolls over to slow charge, it will start to fast charge other connected items if any. It has a total of 8 ports.

Please know that I understand that this may just look like regular USB to my deck, but here's my question... can I get an overnight charge from this thing? I don't see any firm answers.

I used my deck down to about 29% last night, in my comfy chair. Then I didn't charge it at all because I didn't have any spare USB-C chords (arriving today). This morning, I unplugged my USB-C phone and plugged in the deck while I had a shower. It didn't light the power light and it didn't seem to increase the charge (was still 29%) ... but was I just not patient enough --- if I had it plugged in all night, would it benefit?

[Punkovich]

Yes the deck will charge from a 20W charger. It will be slow and if you are actively using the deck at the time it will probably still be draining some from the battery.

However it sounds like there is an issue with your setup. If the light doesnt come on and the icon doesn't change, then its getting NO power. There should be a warning popup about slow chargers and a little exclamaition point on the icon when you plug in a slower charger, but the deck should then just take whatever the charger provides up to 45W.

[zBeeble]

In my case, I plugged it in without turning it on. Should the light still come on when I plug it in without turning it on? Or do I need to turn it on to get this all to fire? When I plug it into my dock, it seems to light (white) and start charging without being turned on.

[Punkovich]

Originally posted by zBeeble:

In my case, I plugged it in without turning it on. Should the light still come on when I plug it in without turning it on? Or do I need to turn it on to get this all to fire? When I plug it into my dock, it seems to light (white) and start charging without being turned on.

Just tested it with mine using the official ac adapter and the powerbank i used for my Switch (24W underpowered for the Deck). The light comes on whenever power is plugged in. It works in both sleep mode and powered completely off.

[Zosuzne]

You can actually check if it gets a valid Power Delivery contract and/or how fast it's charging just using the Steam Deck itself, if you go to the desktop mode and run this in a terminal:

 watch sensors 

It'll show you a bunch of sensors and if you check around the middle it shows what PD voltage and current contract it gets when you plug in a charger.
You can also check how fast it's charging or discharging here using in0 and curr1 .

In game mode you can check the power that's dumped into or pulled from the battery by opening the QAM (...) and scrolling to the bottom of the Performance section.

The Deck's charge controller will at most dump ~22W into its battery, so if the Deck is off all you'd need to charge it at full speed is a proper PD charger with an output of around 20W or more.

I've found that the Steam Deck will accept any voltage between 5V and 15V to charge but only if it gets a valid PD contract. (So to charge properly a Type-C to Type-C cable is required.)

So far I've tested;

• 15W, 5V, 3A (Dell WD15, this dock only supports 5V OR 20V at 3A)
  
• 25W, 9V, 2.77A (25W Samsung Fast Charger)
  
• 39W, 15V, 2.6A (Nintendo Switch Charger or Dock if using an extension)
  
• 24W, 12V, 2A (Witrn U3 in QC2 to PD mode)
  
• 45W, 15V, 3A (Deck's included Charger which actually supports 20V output)
  
• 20W, 9V, 2.22A (Some PD Charger from Aliexpress)
  
• 40W, 15V, 2.67A (Ugreen Dock with PD passthrough)

Anything that doesn't use PD either charges at only 2.5W or not at all as the Deck currently doesn't support BC1.2 or Quick Charge. (Even though the charging chip itself actually can support those protocols according to its datasheet?)

If you're using a dock with PD passthrough the maximum amount of power you can get from that at 15V is 40W since the dock will reserve 5W for itself, PD devices can never ask for more than 3A if they're not also asking for 20V.

[zBeeble]

Well... in my case, the "dock" I got has a 150W barrel input (one of the few docks to come with a power supply) and it delivers upto 100W (more than enough) to the primary PD port, 20W to a secondary PD port (for a phone, etc) and still has regular wattage for 2 more USB ports. In my mind I had already identified the problem --- if you use the deck's power supply to power the dock --- it's always going to be subtracting some.

The one I got is from Anker. It has GigE, display port, HDMI, 2x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.1A, 1 20W PD port (haven't tried data there, yet) and one 100W PD port.

[zBeeble]

UPDATE: It would seem my problem was a cable ... that worked for other things, but not the steamdeck. New cable sorted things. All good.