Battery charges extremely slow

Hi guys,

I've been searching the web for a while now but it's somewhat tricky to feed google the tearms of my search in a way it doesen't bring up issues about a slow computer.

Instead I need advice about a slowly charging battery, well, slow is a very nice description for what I'm experiencing here...
It startet about a week ago, my TravelMate 8573T charges to 20% in about 4 hours, 90% is not even reached after two days and nights. This came very much out of the blue, it was never the fastest to begin with (3-4 hours for full charge) but that was due to the large capacity I assume.

No recent (hardware) modifications were made
Windows 7 + Ubuntu 12.04 Dual Boot, both the same

Any ideas are much appreciated.
Same for links to topics I might not have found whilst my search.

Best regards,
Patrick

 

have you tried updating the bios?

3-4 hours to charge is long from new.

hell myacer 8930g has a 3hour charge max

 

On it, thx, talk to you in 3-5 hours when the battery is above 30% and ready for flashing...

 

Well that didn't help so far, 10% plus in the last 2 hours, might be an improvement, we'll see overnight...

Any other ideas?

 

Alright, at least now it's charged to 99% till the morning, I'll try to calibrate it a couple of times now, maybe we'll see a result

Thanks so far

 

Check battery wear (compare current max capacity do battery's factory capacity). It may be dying or there may be an electrical issue with a circuit that controls charging.
I doubt it's PSU- you would have noticed that while performing daily tasks.

 

Hi, I have very same problem - same laptop, 8573TG. Did you find a solution? I tried updaing BIOS from april 2012, it didn't help. My friend has same laptop with same issiue, my other friend has 8473TG, same problem.
He wrote email to Acer support, they said it is battery's fault, but my has still 82% capacity of the new one. I used Aida64 to measure charging power, now it is only 1955mW, when laptop was new, it was about 15000mW! I think, only solution is to use warranty and send laptop to Acer.

 

Has anyone found a solution on this? Have the same problem with the TravelMate 8473T. Charging takes around 20h and the problem came over night. By googling I found almost nothing besides this and no solution at all.
Also interesting: My laptop dosn't charge at all if it is off and powered by the docking station. Also no power or charging indicator light shows up (on the laptop... the power indicator light on the docking station is showing the correct state: connected to power supply, laptop on docking station and laptop off). If it is plugged in directly it charges and power light is on, but still takes 20h.
I tried 3 different "original" acer chargers... no difference.
An update would be very kind.

 

As I said before (a year ago) in this thread- I don't see how it could be the PSU. I would put my money on the battery itself.

 

Yes, I would agree, that it's not the PSU. I prooved it by using different PSUs. But I also don't think it's a dieing battery.
Reasons against:
1. Problem came over night
2. Forgot to mention: The battery life is completely normal and my laptop can stay on battery - if it's fully charged - for up to 4h like it always used to.

It still could be the charging circutry, either that in the battery or in the laptop. If it is the latter, bying a new battery will lead to nothing. That's why I was asking in the first place. I don't want to invest a lot of money just to find out, what somebody else already did.

 

You are right- if the battery life is good - it's not the battery. Possibly charging circuitry- which could be a cheap fix but not necessarily an easy one- if it's a capatitor going bad someone will have to measure the voltage and current and check what needs to be replaced.

Expensive alternative would be replacing mobo as a whole- that's not what you want I presume.

Can you check what is the voltage and a current going into the battery using multimeter?

 

Same issue here: travelmate 8573tg from 2011, one battery already replaced under warranty, same problem again.
Battery takes hours and hours to get to 100%, and then lasts for 3 hours or so.
Does everyone of you used both linux and windows?
Could it be an issue with linux itself?

I'm out of warranty of course and have to keep it like this until I by a new laptop, but I'm glad I'm not alone!
Has anyone found a solution?

 

It can't be a system issue if it tales such a long time to charge with a system switched off.

 

So it seems there was an hardware issue in some of the notebooks of the family and the assistance replaced my battery without any need. Very good, indeed :-(
My first and last Acer.

 

hi
i have the same problem. acer 5100. it takes 20 hours to fully charge. and then it lasts 2-3 hours.
is it safe to charge like that ? i mean can something broke in there or burn because of charging so long ?
and maybe did someone find a fix for that ? i already updated bios to newest one.
thank you all in advance
filip

 

It is safe to charge it that long because it's being charged with very little power - that's why it takes so long. So nothing will get too hot or anything similar. Still it's one hell of a nuisance...

 

Could it be the battery ?

I say that because my nearly 8yr old Acer 9301 (that I'm on now) still has the original battery which still lasts an hour + and charges quickly back to 100% as normal.

A new non Acer battery (same capacity) charges to only 60% or so and then takes several hours to make it 100%. Battery life of the new one is excellent, 2 to 3 hours run time.

So could something "characteristic wise" with the cells in the posters original battery have changed.

 

It's hard to tell just like that but bear in mind that batteries charge rate starts slowing down as the battery is closer to being sully charged. If you use an app like AIDA (formerly Everest) or similar which shows charge rate, you'll notice it starts with a reasonably high charge rate (mine 25W) and then slowly goes down.

Anyway - without knowing the charge rate and how long it takes the battery of a given capacity with a given PSU, it's hard to tell of it's OK or not, but st first glance you're describing a normal process.

 

For info... I had the new battery on charge for around 7 hours before it showed 100% full. Also the charge light on the laptop continually changes from red to green once around 60% charge was reached. The battery icon shows "plugged in not charging", then after a few seconds it changes to charging. This cycle continues until fully charged. The LED never reverts to green with this new battery. However, the battery itself in terms of run time seems excellent and much better than the original was when new. This leads me to believe that although its marked as the same capacity, it may in reality be higher. The part number for what its worth (with it being a non Acer) is identical. It seems the built in battery chip is conveying incorrect info to the laptop regarding the state of charge, but it does get there eventually. I'm just doing another full discharge now to calibrate the battery meter although this has no bearing on charging, Interesting

 

While it's unlikely to help - make sure you uninstall the battery in device manager, reboot and let the driver install again.
Although that is very unlikely to have any effect.

Does this issue exist regardless of whether the notebook is on or off while charging?

 

Thanks, yes I tried that trick. The behaviour is the same whether the laptop is on or not. I thought about what actually happens when charging and realised that the windows battery meter and so on are all really like a kind of "app" and that the hardware and BIOS firmware that communicate with the battery at a basic level is what actually determines the charging. The OS has no control over it. I suspect a case of the generic battery not being coded correctly for the Acer, but that said it seems to perform well apart from the very long charge times.

 

OK, we are on charge from 5% cut off point and its charging at around 1% per 45 seconds. I switched off at around 20% full and left it. Some 30 to 40 minutes later I came back and saw the charge light flashing green/red at around a 0.5Hz rate.I boot up and the battery shows 65% charged and "plugged in not charging". I leave it running and notice the battery meter regularly "resets" to the "moving and charging" icon you see when first putting back on charge (until it normally settles at a steady value).. This seems to happen every four minutes or so. Every time this occurs the percentage charge increments up by 1%. For brief moment around the time of this icon behaviour the message changes to "plugged in and charging".

It has to be the battery... not faulty as such, but incorrectly configured for the purely hardware related charging circuit on the motherboard. I suspect its reverting to some "default" charge pattern in th absence of correct info from the onboard chip in the batery.