How to Shut Down Before the Battery Fails

Power Manager is able to safely shut down your Mac before the built-in battery runs out of power. Power Manager can also do the same for Uninterruptible Power Supply connected Macs.

Power Manager is able to safely shut down your Mac before the built-in battery runs out of power. Power Manager can also do the same for Uninterruptible Power Supply connected Macs.

An earlier recipe walked through the steps needed to shut down when the power supply fell. This recipe improves on that approach; the latest version of Power Manager includes a new dedicated Schedule Assistant task for this situation.

Other new tasks can make your Mac run a script, launch an application, or run an Automator workflow when the battery drops below a specified level. You can even combine events to have different actions perform at different levels of power remaining.

In this recipe we will create an event to safely shut down your Mac when the power reaches 30% remaining. At this point any running applications will be quit, users logged out, and the Mac fully powered down.

Create an Emergency Shut Down Event

  1. Launch Power Manager.app

  2. Click Add… to create a new event

    Click Add… to begin creating the event

  3. Select the Power down on battery remaining task

    Select the Power down on battery remaining task

  4. Continue to the What and When step

Set the power remaining and action to perform

  1. Select 30% for Trigger when battery reaches

  2. Select Shut Down for What should be performed?

  3. Continue passed the Constraints step

    Continue passed the Constraints for this recipe

  4. Continue to the Why step and describe your event

    Name and describe your new event

  5. Continue and Add the event.

    Confirm the event can be created

    Your emergency shut down event is created and ready

Your emergency shut down event is ready and will take affect whenever your battery power reaches or drops below 30% remaining.