Running X1 Extreme (gen3) on 12V power

[gggeek]

Hello all.

I'm moving on a narrowboat as live-aboard, where the main power lines available are 12V, with either usb or car-chargers sockets. Home-working in large part, as software dev (that means running VMs, heavy IDEs etc).
When running on battery, I rarely get more than 5 hours of usage before I need recharging.
My Thinkpad comes with a huge 170W charger.
I did measure power consumption using a software during one day of normal usage, and reported cpu+gpu usage range was 15 to 65W.

I searched for options to be able to power the laptop from 12V sockets, but there seems to be no ideal solution:

- Lenovo does sell a 65W charger with 12V DC input, but their support said that it would not be enough to power the laptop (I suspect it might work well enough to run the laptop, without the battery getting recharged at the same time, but I'm loath to buy it only to find out that it actually gets recognized as insufficient by the laptop's bmc and thus rendered useless)

- there are 12V-20V DC upscalers on aliexpress, but I am not sure how good they are - there's a very wide price range, from 10 to 200 pounds. Also: would their output be clean enough not to damage the laptop's battery? Will the laptop's bmc not be too fussy with that power source? Do they actually loose some/a lot of power in the conversion?

Does anyone have suggestions?

Note: there are 240V sockets as well on board, but in order to be powered, those need an inverter to be separately turned on, and the inverter does consume power on its own. And the boat's battery bank is not huge, and in the winter the solar panels on the roof do not produce much power...

[RealBlackStuff]

With limited power available such as on your narrowboat, you'd need to look for a more power-friendly laptop.
Have a look at the likes of T14 Gen 3 with AMD CPU, which can run 12 hours or more and 'only' need a 65W charger.
https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkP ... _Gen_3_AMD