Poor battery life, 100% health

[praetorx]

I've upgraded my late 2011 15" MBP from the stock 700GB HDD to the new Intel 520 series 240GB SSD and was hoping a dramatic improvement in battery life but despite this my battery only lasts for 2hrs and 30min.

iStat Pro reports 100% health and only 69 cycles of charge.

This is worse than my previous Lenovo W510 which had a much more power hungry cpu (Extreme i7) than the current 2.4GHz i7 and same battery life like my current Mac.

I'm not doing anything extreme either, just browsing the web - auto background lighting and wifi off (only bluetooth is on)

Should I take this to "the shop"?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

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Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.
Also check the "System Memory" tab to see what your "Page ins:", "Page outs:" and "Swap used:" are.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example

Further reading:

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Making The Most of Activity Monitor
What Is Activity Monitor (or How to Take Your Mac's Pulse)​

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This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
Apple Notebook Battery FAQ by GGJstudios
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[balamw]

What was you battery life before the SSD?

B

 

[GGJstudios]

I've upgraded my late 2011 15" MBP from the stock 700GB HDD to the new Intel 520 series 240GB SSD and was hoping a dramatic improvement in battery life but despite this my battery only lasts for 2hrs and 30min.

Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). Also, click on the System Memory tab at the bottom. Then take a screen shot, scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot and post them.

There are many factors that impact your battery life. See the BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE section of the following link for details.

This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​

 

[praetorx]

Firefox takes about 10% out of the CPU time and Shockwave Flash plugin about 6% when idle.
If I stream a movie Firefox takes 35% CPU and Shockwave 10%.

That explains it all.

 

[seveej]

This is worse than my previous Lenovo W510 which had a much more power hungry cpu (Extreme i7) than the current 2.4GHz i7 and same battery life like my current Mac.

Processes (Flash especially) might be part of the equation.
Further tips:
Install click-to-flash or a similar solution, which disables flash on websites (so that you need to click them to open them. See if this helps.
Also, the discrete GPU (which does not show in activity monitor) may be part of the problem.
- Install Coconut battery, among other things, it shows your (almost) real time battery consumption (in Watts), which is useful for seeing how much power your computer actually consumes.
- Get gfxCardStatus, and (when you do not need the discrete GPU), switch it off. N.B!, I do not recommend using gfxCardStatus if you're using a TB display, as they do (in some cases) not like each other.

Disabling Flash on websites usually give me an extra hour.
Disabling the discrete GPU can bump battery life significantly (I can reach 9-10 hours that way).

RGDS,
Pekka