How much battery power do you actually lose if you use the keyboard backlight on a laptop?
Almost every laptop sold today has a backlit keyboard. What this does is that it lights up each key making it easier to see in the dark and easier to work on in dark rooms.
I have gotten so used to a backlit keyboard that I always buy external keyboards with it built-in as well. Even though I know my way around a keyboard, I never have to guess which key I need to push even when it’s dark.
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One of the most important features of a laptop is its battery life, and these lights need to use some of the battery power, right?
They sure do, but how much battery power do you lose by using this feature?
What lights are used in backlit keyboards?
The lights used in backlit keyboards are LED lights. You might have heard of LED as the latest and greatest light technology.
LED lights are great because they can output a lot of light with a relatively small amount of electricity/battery power.
Not only are they very efficient, they can be extremely small. That’s why they can fit under a keyboard key.
The technology itself has gotten better and better in the past 20 years, and LED lights can now output the same amount of light as a halogen lamp while saving 90% electricity.
So backlit keyboards don’t use any battery power?
Well, to light up a whole keyboard you need more than one LED light. And even though they are efficient light sources, they do require a little bit of power.
Exactly how much power they use depend on several factors.
The conditions
How long is the laptop going to be on? Are the backlight on the dimmest or the brightest setting? How many keys are there that need to be lit?
These are some of the factors that play in to how much battery the LED lights are going to eat up.
How many watts LED lights (to cover all of the keys) they require
In general, you can expect a backlit keyboard to use 1-5W. If you have a 50Wh laptop battery, it would then in worst case run only the backlit keyboard up to 10 hours.
Let’s say you have a laptop that doesn’t last more than two hours when you are gaming, and you have set the keyboard brightness to medium.
Then the backlit keyboard shouldn’t use even 5Wh by the time the battery is drained.
But if you have one of the latest MacBook Pros that has a 10 hour battery life, the backlit keyboard can end up using quite a lot of the battery if you make it through the full 10 hours.
What can I do to extend the battery life when using the backlight feature?
Most computers nowadays have sensors that make them smart enough to automatically adjust the keyboard brightness to your room.
Meaning that if it’s dark, it brightens the keys. But if it’s in the middle of the day and it senses a lot of light, it might even turn off the backlight completely.
On a MacBook it might not even let you turn on the backlit keyboard because it’s so bright, that is Apple trying to stop you from draining battery life for no reason.
Instead of focusing on the backlit keyboard I suggest focusing on the screen brightness instead since it uses a lot more power than the LED lights behind the keys.
Lowering your screen brightness will significantly increase the battery life, and you should get used to lowering and increasing it as needed.
Even though it might be set to auto brightness, maybe you can lower it even further if you need to save battery power?
What is the best portable backlit keyboard?
I am a Mac-guy, and I really like the MX Keys by Logitech (click to view on Amazon) .
It can of course also be used with Windows.
It’s a backlit keyboard that charges via USB C, and since I also use an MX Master 3 Mouse (click to view on Amazon) I can use the same Logitech unifying receiver with both peripherals.
The reason it’s my favorite is that it’s a smart keyboard.
The backlight only turns on when you move your hands over the keys to start using it.
If I walk away or stop typing for a minute to watch a video on YouTube, the backlight turns off to save battery power.
Because of this I rarely have to charge the battery even though I use it for several hours everyday.
