Lap top battery Longevity

There's a lot of information about that if you keep a Laptop battery charged between only 80% full and only 40% full, it will be servicable over the years for four times as long.

Other information I find says it is the charging and discharging that wears the battery out.

The laptop i have (with a built in battery) is mainly used in one room, so it is easy to keep it plugged in *all the time* to mains electricity.

Would it be better to prolong the life of the battery to keep it plugged in all the time or to go for the 80% - 40% option. Thanks.

Reply to
john west
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I asked a similar question a couple of years ago, in a computer newsgroup, and there was little consensus about the best method of conserving the battery. It will be interesting to see if there is anything new. I bought this laptop new about four years ago, and used it with the battery installed, but using the mains, and the battery power is almost zero now, so I am looking for the best way to treat a replacement battery.

Reply to
Davey

There's several things that control the life of rechargeable batteries:

The quality of the cells The temperature they run at (and available cooling) The loads they get put to (see temperature) The smartness of the battery manager in terms of charging, discharging and balancing.

As always 'it depends', but I'd suggest the battery manager is smarter than you are are regards maintaining the optimal state of charge to keep the battery happy. The only thing is that it has no prescience over what you're going to do in future - eg store the laptop for months unplugged - but otherwise I'd suggest it's best to leave it to it.

That doesn't apply so much to old laptops (dumb batteries), cheaper laptops (poorly written management software) or removable batteries (in some cases the manager might be in the appliance or charger not in the battery - unlikely with laptops but can apply to eg power tools).

It'll depend on the battery manager in that particular machine, but one thing to say is keep the battery cool. If the laptop gets hot, that'll degrade battery life. Also it's worth using the battery from time to time - don't leave it on charger forever. But otherwise it's going to be pretty hard to maintain 40-80% without causing lots of charge/discharge cycles which will wear the battery.

Theo

Reply to
Theo

it probbably depends on teh tyep of battery and the make of teh battery and charging circuit, I'm sure Apple used to advise discharging it comnpletely every month adn then charging it to full as this updates the info of teh b attery condition so it can fully charge rather than part charge.

well yes they have a 'life cycle' but I'm not sure with todays battereis wh ether charging them up every hour to keep them charged is the best option on to let them go below 10% is best. Not havign a labtop means I don;lt have to think about it. I charge my iup ad when I;m NOT using it and it;s below about 50% charged. Last night it stopped while I was listening to a podcast 4% was the last I noticed. So at 1:10am I decided I might as well go to bed and charge the ip ad ready for the morning.

Reply to
whisky-dave

With my sony touch screen vaio, sony themselves say set charge to 80% makes it last longer.

Reply to
F Murtz

the latter.

longevity of Li-ion is vastly reduced at high states of charge, more than the issues of multiple shallow cycling.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

My wife's Samsung netbook has a setting for battery conservation which is 80%. If we are travelling we reset this to 100% but at home it is back to 80%. This is an early 2012 purchase and without specific testing the battery appears fine.

For my main Lenovo laptop (2007) I have two batteries. The original and now basically defunct battery is in all the time, it just about has enough juice to shut down on no power. The other I only use if I'm about to travel.

I've taken the battery out of an occasionally used laptop which essentially makes it no different to a normal desktop computer as far as power is concerned.

Reply to
AnthonyL

It depends on the charger in the laptop. I have an Acer laptop - not the cheapest they did - which cooks the battery if left in the machine. So I remove it when not needed. A better designed one wouldn't cause problems.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Both are true, but keeping it fully charged all the time kills it even faster than cycling it through periodic discharge. It is bad to keep it near either end of the spectrum for long periods of time. How hot the PC gets plays a part too - and they generally run faster and hotter on mains when all power saving features are typically disabled.

Charged and on mains supply is how I generally killed my portables - it runs faster when on mains so it generally is unless I'm travelling.

Deep discharged and left for a long period of time will brick it into a state where safety features will (should) prevent it ever working again.

Even so you should cycle the battery to 20% or lower and then recharge at least once a month. I have killed plenty of laptop batteries on continuous power. The newer chemistry is a bit more robust but in search of ever greater energy density that margin gets eroded again.

You need to cycle the battery every couple of weeks or so or the chemistry will get stuck in a charged but forgotten how to discharge state. That means when you do need to use it the remaining battery capacity is a tiny fraction of its nominal rating. No problem if you can always use it on mains power but a nuisance when travelling.

Reply to
Martin Brown

That sounds like decent advice. Although I rarely need to run on battery power, it is worth having one that will actually run. I can buy a replacement for my dead one, and implement a serious charging routine based on the above.

Next question: Which battery suppliers are good, and which are to be avoided? Or should I buy a proper Samsung battery?

Reply to
Davey

difficult Q considering the problems they are having with soem of their exploding phones and washing machines catching fire. In theory gettign an original battery from a trusted supplier would be the best bet.

Reply to
whisky-dave

The question is unanswerable. The whole thing depends on how the charger works. In most cases I've encountered there is a circuit inside the laptop that monitors the battery, sometimes from a separate contact on the pack which may or may not have its own electronics monitoring the cells. At any rate, however it is done it seems to read, pulse then re read the battery and somehow decides whether to increase the charging times of the pulses and hence charge it. However if the charger is pretty dumb and just keeps on charging, which I've never encountered it will trash the batter quite fast That only leaves you able to decide how much you use it before recharging, and I suspect the little ever changing info in the task bar is only a rough guess from some arbitrary timer in the machine that may or may not look at the current used as it goes along. All I know is that on my Dell, it lasts longer with the screen off, and even longer if you allow it to throttle back the processor, so without some idea of a make and model its probably just an educated guess. I think as long as one does not run it completely flat, something which the dell will not allow forcing you to close it at around 14 percent left, then the life should be reasonable assuming no faults in a cell or other nasty happenings. So how many words was that for, don't know! Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

This is an urban myth that applied to (some) eary nickel chemistry. It is completely untrue for lithium ion batteries.

These like to be left neither charged nor discharged.

They will self discharge over a few years, so need recharging every - say - 6 months.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I have my laptop on a docking station ... so always keeps it charged to 100%

Reply to
rick

On 09/12/2016 13:37, Martin Brown wrote: ll the time or to go for the 80% - 40% option. Thanks.

Charging memory is supposed to have disappeared years ago - modern chemistry much better

Reply to
rick

Samsung is essentially a country. Just because one bit makes a bad product doesn't mean all of it does. It's not like the phone and washing machine departments are going to have anything in common, beyond senior management and contributing to the same balance sheet. Would you not sail in a Samsung ship because they have a problem with exploding phones?

Anyway, if you want it to last buy an original manufacturer battery. There's way too many junk batteries being churned out of China. The quality of a battery is measured in the number of cycles it can do, which you won't find out until several years down the track. A cheap battery (or a cheap battery with an expensive price tag) might do 100-200 cycles before capacity drops, when the OEM battery does 1000. This means you have to view all aftermarket batteries with suspicion because you just can't tell.

The last non-OEM battery I bought, they got rather fed up of me after the third claim on the year's warranty...

Theo

Reply to
Theo

What about leaving the charger connected to the laptop when it's not being used, effectively charging a full battery. Does that damage the battery over time?

Each laptop I've owned (successively: Win XP, Vista, 7) I've tried to be really careful to do all the right things and none of the wrong things:

- only connect to the mains to charge the battery and sometimes while using the laptop

- normally run the laptop down to about half charge and then top up again, repeating that cycle if I'm using the laptop for a prolonged period

- run the laptop down to zero charge every few days

But each one has eventually, after a couple of years, suffered from gradually reduced battery capacity that has eventually led to the laptop only being usable on mains (ie it switches off immediately the mains plug is removed). For one of the laptops, I bought a cheap Chinese clone battery which seemed to last about as long as the one that was originally fitted, rather than a much shorter time as I was expecting.

Manufacturers were, respectively, Acer, HP and Samsung - though where they source their batteries from is anyone's guess.

Reply to
NY

I had a Samsung bluray DVD which failed so I chucked it away and got a much superior Sony, but that did not stop me buying a £300 Samsung 1TB SSD storage drive.

Reply to
Simon Mason

Such as the (11 year old) Acer Aspire 3660 I've had on permanent 'charge' for the whole of its life to date which seems to still have around 70% or so of its original battery capacity.

I figure the battery has lasted this long because of the more 'sympathetic' charge maintenance routine which avoids the "Float Charging" concept, electing instead to charge up to the 4.2v per cell level and then leave the battery to slowly decline in voltage over the several weeks of mains powered use before giving it a 10 or 15 minute topping up charge.

As you can imagine, the chances of 'catching it in the act' of 'charging' on such a low duty cycle are almost zero but I did eventually see the green battery light change to the red 'charging' state for a ten or 15 minute period before turning green again after a few years of ownership. Subsequent to which event, I then paid the battery charge light a little more attention which allowed me to witness a few more of these 'topping up' charge events over the next 5 or 6 years.

Sadly, this laptop has rather outlived its usefulness so it simply sits perched on top of the filing cabinet where it has spent 99.99% of its 11 year life, plugged into the charger to maintain the battery whilst I ponder its future (if any). :-(

Reply to
Johnny B Good

The one on mine was knackered after not much more than a year. It's a

5536. Of course if you used the battery every day - perhaps what a laptop is meant for - having it fully charged whenever possible might be important. Only when I Googled did I find that the battery didn't like being left in with the laptop PS left on 24/7. So I now remove the replacment battery when not needed.

It's odd they changed the concept of battery charging.

My 5536 was also the one where the soldering to one of the processors failed. Luckily, found a firm who fixed it for an affordable sum. And it seems OK now - although I've now got a better one.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

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