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Koeta May 12, 2022 @ 6:57pm

Charging LED turning on and off

is it normal for the white Charging LED to turn on and off when the battery is at 100% and the deck is plugged into the wall in standby?

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Showing 1-11 of 11 comments

bean May 12, 2022 @ 9:18pm

the steam deck has a safety feature for the battery where it will let the deck slowly discharge if it is plugged in 24/7

that could be what you are seeing

Koeta May 12, 2022 @ 9:52pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9bxmurKuFA

Video clip I made of it, just trying to make sure it's not an issue can't find any real info about it online, the deck shows it's charged 100% and works fine (just got it today)

ReBoot May 13, 2022 @ 12:03am

The Deck doing that battery dance Bean is describing has actually been known for a month or two now.

That's not even unique to the Deck! Portable/mobile devices not keeping your battery @ full when plugged in, doing said dance to make the battery age slower, is pretty much an industry standard.

djdavis1420 Oct 11, 2022 @ 8:19pm

My Deck does the exact same thing. I checked with a friend at work who also has a Deck, and his does it as well. With the official Dock available now, I was thinking of getting it, but this behavior makes me a little concerned about leaving it plugged in all the time.

invision2212 Oct 12, 2022 @ 1:58am

Originally posted by djdavis1420:
My Deck does the exact same thing. I checked with a friend at work who also has a Deck, and his does it as well. With the official Dock available now, I was thinking of getting it, but this behavior makes me a little concerned about leaving it plugged in all the time.

If you leave it plugged in the battery will drain to 93% and then top off to 100% and repeat this pattern.

I use my deck plugged in all the time and the battery health is still 99% months later.

Star*Echo Dec 7, 2022 @ 12:07pm

Originally posted by ReBoot:
The Deck doing that battery dance Bean is describing has actually been known for a month or two now.

That's not even unique to the Deck! Portable/mobile devices not keeping your battery @ full when plugged in, doing said dance to make the battery age slower, is pretty much an industry standard.

Correct (at least from what I found looking around) - It allows your battery to not drain and burn out fast. It reroutes power from going straight to battery constantly when it reaches a certain percentage point. This is a good thing. They say if you're not going to be using the deck in the dock for a day or two then to unplug it, but if you're using it docked all the time, you will see the light cycle as in first post. Again, this is a good thing for the life of your battery.

Hope that helps - It took a lot of digging around the community and google when I had my own concerns about leaving your deck docked all the time and connected to power. It's only hard to find info since both the deck and official dock are so new. I was not only relieved, but happy to hear that they were forward thinking about rerouting the power from the battery at a certain percentage to stop drainage - a lot of people do keep their deck in dock mode on a basically constant daily basis, more than undocked usage.

BTW, what I found was based on users that were using the official steam dock from Valve, not 2nd party docks. I don't know if this is relevant to other docks besides the official one. I don't know how 100% correct this information is either, but it did make sense and gave me a seemingly acceptable answer to my searches about being plugged into the dock on a steady basis.

Star*Echo Dec 7, 2022 @ 12:10pm

Originally posted by Star*Echo:
Originally posted by ReBoot:
The Deck doing that battery dance Bean is describing has actually been known for a month or two now.

That's not even unique to the Deck! Portable/mobile devices not keeping your battery @ full when plugged in, doing said dance to make the battery age slower, is pretty much an industry standard.

Correct (at least from what I found looking around) - It allows your battery to not drain and burn out fast. It reroutes power from going straight to battery constantly when it reaches a certain percentage point. This is a good thing. They say if you're not going to be using the deck in the dock for a day or two then to unplug it, but if you're using it docked all the time, you will see the light cycle as in first post. Again, this is a good thing for the life of your battery.

Hope that helps - It took a lot of digging around the community and google when I had my own concerns about leaving your deck docked all the time and connected to power. It's only hard to find info since both the deck and official dock are so new. I was not only relieved, but happy to hear that they were forward thinking about rerouting the power from the battery at a certain percentage to stop drainage - a lot of people do keep their deck in dock mode on a basically constant daily basis, more than undocked usage.

BTW, what I found was based on users that were using the official steam dock from Valve, not 2nd party docks. I don't know if this is relevant to other docks besides the official one. I don't know how 100% correct this information is either, but it did make sense and gave me a seemingly acceptable answer to my searches about being plugged into the dock on a steady basis.

My apologies, I just realized when I posted this, I read the question wrong and was thinking about the light when in docked mode! But maybe this can help somebody. Sorry! :)

Chimpychomps Mar 17, 2023 @ 12:34am

Same on mine, using a non-valve docking station. A bit of a drag, as the docking station is in the bedroom, and the light goes on and off all night long.

Star*Echo Mar 17, 2023 @ 3:00pm

Originally posted by Chimpychomps:
Same on mine, using a non-valve docking station. A bit of a drag, as the docking station is in the bedroom, and the light goes on and off all night long.

One of the things I did learn is that when in docked mode it WILL light up from time to time. It's spaced apart for me and I've never monitored, but I know that I notice it on and off (plus mine in BR too) but it doesn't seem constant, just a few seconds at a time every now and then through the day.

From what I read, it automatically recycles and keeps the battery from going on under 80%. So it's normal, but if it's doing it a lot then maybe put out a bug report to see what they have to say. I may be way off base, but I've had my Steam Dock since Q4 shipments and I had spent a lot of time looking into everything I can about it. I know you said yours was a 3rd party dock, but I think that the workings go on in the Deck mostly, so I don't know how it'd be different.

Do you run a lot of things off your dock? I run a mech kb, a usb headset, and a wire usb controller since my stupid BT Ninty Switch Pro controller started acting crazy so I'm using all my ports with wired and 1 battery thing (headset). I'm thinking that if you have a lot of battery or constant energy draining additions might make it light more often. That's cause they might need to be kept charged a lot on other things depending on what you have connected and might be causing your dock to use up some of the power from your deck for other things. Your deck is lighting up more than usual because it's trying to keep it from going under 80% more often than it would otherwise.

Don't know totally but I've totally been where you are - knocking my head against the wall trying to figure out what's going on with something as new as the Deck and it being able to use when docked. There's not a lot of info yet, where as the Deck has been released almost a year now but not in huge quantities until about Aug/Sept of last year - I was Q4 release and got mine the end of September and my heart sunk that there wasn't a lot of information out there yet. As you can tell, it's a lot of stuff Valve has been awesome staying up with the response and popularity of it trying to make sure we all get our stuff running well, what's good us is good for them too you know :D Hope this helps some, but just based on what I've seen and personally experienced, but can't find hard information yet to verify.