Chromebooks will automatically go to sleep by default after 6 minutes of no use. This could be great for some people, but many others do not want their Chromebook to automatically enter sleep mode. Generally, the sleep mode will maximize your battery time. Sleep mode on a Chromebook saves battery life by turning off the screen and Wifi and suspends apps and power-supping background processes when they’re not needed. Again, not all users will want the Chromebook to enter sleep mode after 6 minutes. Unfortunately, Google makes it pretty hard to customize the Chromebook sleep settings.

How To Stop Your Chromebook from Sleep Mode

There is no setting that you can change on  your Chromebook to prevent it from sleeping. You will need an external app. The best one is call called Keep Awake which can disable the Chromebook sleep mode, both if the lid is closed or when the idle sleep timeout is reached.

The Keep Awake extension adds a small button to the Chrome toolbar menu. Specifically, it adds an icon in the upper-right corner of the browser that can be clicked to switch between modes where the screen is kept on (sun icon), the system is prevented from sleeping (sunset), or power-saving settings are left unchanged (moon). This button can be clicked to toggle between modes that override the default power settings of Chrome OS:

• The Moon Icon will basically act as if Keep Awake is not installed on your Chromebook. This will disable Keep Awake and let your Chromebook perform its regular sleep functions (sleeping after 6 minutes).
• The Sunset Icon will allow your Chromebook to blank the screen but will prevent it from going into a full sleep mode. This will be useful to save battery life but save you time from having to wake up the Chromebook from Sleep mode.
• The Sun Icon will keep your machine from going to sleep in all situations. The screen will not go blank, and it also won’t sleep when you close the lid. It’ll remain on in all instances. This would completely disable the sleep function on a Chromebook.

Keep Awake will not keep your Chromebook from sleeping when you close the lid; it works only when your Chromebook is open. And it works only on Chrome OS, in case you were thinking of using it as an easy power utility on a MacBook or Windows laptop. Also note, when the system is prevented from sleeping (sunset icon), network connections will remain active; this may be useful if using e.g. the Secure Shell app. The screen will still dim and turn off eventually, though. In the “screen is kept on” mode (sun icon), the system will avoid sleeping and the display will additionally remain on.

How to Keep Your Chromebook from Sleeping