My only issue with the T530 is battery life, I barely get 2 hours on a full charge (not sure the replacement battery is very good, however).

It's worth running 'powertop' and seeing what it recommends. I've then put a set of suggested shell commands into a script which I run. On my X220, with WiFi and Chrome and medium brightness, consumption is about 10 W.

Thinkpads can also support not charging the battery to 100% / over-cycling it, which can help prolong battery lifetime:

    sudo modprobe tp_smapi
    echo 40 | sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/start_charge_thresh
    echo 80 | sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/stop_charge_thresh

I seem to recall the folks behind Solus (the distro I use) remind people not to use TLP because it leads to lock-ups or unwanted behavior and it ends up not being worth the trouble. Not sure if powertop is any different, I may give it a go.

Powertop echo's the shell command it is doing to effect the change. Most of it is just changing defaults in /proc. You can experiment yourself. For instance, I find that making the audio-codec go power-saving leads to pops and crackles over headphones.