9-Cell HD Battery Reads "4.8% Wear"

Just got battery bar installed. It says my 9-cell is at 4.8% wear, which is interesting since I just got it, what, two days ago? It wear really fast, start out with some wear, or did I get stuck with a used battery or something from HP?

 

See if you can return/RMA it to HP.

 

A lot of batteries will end up starting out with some wear, as batteries wear almost from the moment they're produced. So part of the question becomes how long that battery was sitting on the shelf before you got it. Also, if you haven't already done a battery calibration, the wear that battery bar lists might be off.

 

How do I do a calibration?

 

Charge your battery to full, unplug it and then fully discharge it (keep it running until your computer shuts off from lack of battery; this means that you need to disable automatic sleep and hibernate; some people do this from the BIOS screen), and then fully charge it again. For that matter, sometimes there is an option in the BIOS to do this automatically. Note that this is something that will take several hours to do.

 

I will do that tomorrow before work and let it drain while gone.

Thanks

 

Calibration will wear it out even more.

I wouldn't be surprised if your next post will be something like "I did the calibration and now it's at 6%+".

I think calibration is only a good idea if you think your battery life is reported incorrectly.
For example it could show that you have 20mins left and then just shutdown.

I could be wrong though.

 

Repeated calibration will, yes. But usually, when you recalibrate, it just shows the wear that's occurred since you last calibrated, which doesn't show up until you do calibrate. Even so, at least one calibration is always recommended for a new battery/system. In fact, it's often listed that you should do so in the manual that comes with a new system (or at least it used to be).

 

Not sure if you are right about that.

Charging lithium-ion batteries

I just don't care about my battery, not worth stressing over it.

 

Do not put a lithium-ion battery to 0% charge, you will kill it.

 

I don't think it's possible to get it to the "real" 0%.

There should be some safety circuit to stop it discharging at some point.

I bet if you really wanted 0% you would need to take the cells out of the pack. Or discharge the battery as much as you can, then store it somewhere for a while and let the self-discharge take care of what's left.

I really don't think the OP should attempt calibration. It's probably already calibrated and so calibrating it again will just give you more wear.

 

I thought putting a battery at 0% puts it a low voltage and that is what kills batteries or more so constantly charging 100% then 0% and recharging back t0 100%.

 

All li-ion batteries come with a PCB/PCM, which is a protective circuit that keeps it from going below the danger lvl. The only way to bypass that is if you run it try and then keep trying to turn it on. The PCM/PCB will take a few second to kick in but if you do that many many times it will bring it below that threshold. Also the PCM/PCB will also keep it from over charging and over discharging. If you have a high performance laptop and do furmark and prime95 you will overload the battery and the PCM/PCB will kick in and shut down the battery before any damage is down....i know from experience for that one -_- Also you do need to drain the battery once every 30-50 charges to recalibrate the battery. Though i believe the only thing this does is correct the accuracy of monitoring the battery. As in gauging how much battery is actually left when you are using your laptop. I have no clue if that will help get an accurate reading in battery bar. I have never used that program so i got no clue. I also wouldn't worry about a 4% ware....then again I never used that program and i haven't seen any studies saying yes or no that batteries are supposed to come with 0% ware. Who knows the accuracy of that program. I recommend posting on their forums.

 

This thread is very interesting. I might do it just because HP says I should on their website. If it does not make the wear go down I will just try to replace battery through them anyway.

 

sorry forgot to comment on yours. I also agree but i am not sure if calibration makes a change with reading wear. I also agree worring about it is not worth it.

 

So then what will you do when you get another battery and it had 6.5% wear cause it sat on the shelf even longer than the one you got?

I would not worry about it, Li-Ion starts to degrade the second it comes off the production line. Just charge your battery, use your battery, it is a consumable that's meant to be used. The work you go through to get a new one is worth way more than the less than 5% of battery you not getting.

Edit: since your battery is new I would not waste the cycle to calibrate it, as your wear level will go down even further after doing one. Save if for after you have lots of cycles and at the point when you may need to know more accurately how much capacity you have left. right now its new so you know that you have pretty much full capacity ( minus the small amount of 4.8%).

 

i agree with your statement that currently is a waste to cycle it completely. It's only important when its off by alot. Which takes a long time for that to happen. I have never once calibrated my batteries ever. I never noticed a problem. The 30-50 cycles to recalibrate was a recommendation i read online from some site that specialized in batteries. I have seen the 30-50 cycles from several sites but honestly....its not worth it unless you got a problem with it being obviously messed up.

 

That is absolutely the worst thing you can do: fully discharge a battery and let it sit there (for hours) before you charge it again.

This will ensure that it will drop below the levels that DCMAKER discussed - effectively killing the battery if it drops sufficiently below the 'safe' level and will not let you recharge it when you finally get back home.

I concur with othonda; use your battery normally.

Good luck.

 

True to an extent. I do not think the battery will go below that threshold or vary far past it in a day....now if you use til its dead and leave it there for a week....thats really bad but for several hours that should be too bad. Granted if your laptop somehow pulls charge from it while its off than that'll cause a problem but again i do not think a few hours will cause a problem.
EDIT: though its true playing it safe is better ^^ I wouldn't do that while i wasn't home. As i always say poop does hit the fan.....a lot...at least for me -_-

Now on a side note i remember reading a study years ago that talked about electronics(anything pluged into an outlet) would still pull current from the wall and waste power. The study said that about 3% of all power used in the world is from devices that are turned off and still pulling power. Now don't quote me on this but i think it was about 3% that study stated. Now i wouldn't go around unplugging every coord out of the wall in your house to save 3-10 dollars a month but that is alot of power when you think of it in a worldwide scrope. Thats billions of dollars and resources of energy wasted...maybe even more than billions a year. Maybe it would be a good idea when you go on vacation to pull them out but besides that again...not worth the effort.


EDIT:i'll post my wear lvl later...i bet its really bad lol. Mine has gone through hell lol

oh and what does the wear lvl mean? Does that mean you already lost 5% total capacity? Or 5% of total cycles....i am just curious on what that number really represents. I am about to google battery bar but i was curious.

 

No idea what it means. I did not use it, but all this talk about how bad cycling it is... I have been testing battery life since the day I got it! But to be fair I never got it down very far, never past 25% off the top of my head, but I think more like 35% or more. Says something about the battery life of the laptop when I could not get it lower before bedtime and plugging it back in .

Thanks for the heads up guys. I was not sure what to think when I saw that!

 

lol min says 26% wear from 50Wh to 36Wh. I doubt its that bad....because i still get about the same battery life as i did a year ago. I mean i have used the battery a TON but i haven't noticed 26% drop lol. Maybe 10 mins or 15 but i honestly haven't noticed any lol. plus you get 300 cycles...full cycles before you drop 20% but i haven't used more than a 100 i don't think....maybe more than a hundred.

EDIT: when the battery hit 5% and went to hibernate battery bar numbers changed and went to ~43Wh/50Wh so i had ~15% wear from the last second reading. So its off and recharging. i'll post my findings in an hour or so. I can't see me having more than 10-15% wear...at least not too much more than that...and i have beaten the crap out of it too lol. But i haven't beaten it badly enough for it to be 26% lol

 

There is lots of information here but most of it is disjointed and in some cases can be misconstrued because of it.

As far as I'm concerned, there are no absolutes for battery longevity because they are so many environmental factors that can effect/alter their performance. Therefore, as someone already stated, a small amount of deviation is not that big a deal.

Like it or not, all batteries will degrade even under pristine conditions, and whether you use them or not. So the best we can do (once we get them) is to try and maintain the preservation standards and conditions that will reduce the degradation for as long as possible.

 

could not have said it better...being serious read my posts ^^


after that drain my wear is "18%" 41Wh out of 50Wh. I can believe that since all the stuff i have done to this. This laptop is a year old and has had heavy abuse so i guess i got another year before i need to replace/rebuild it. I am looking for a 9cell version too that is dead so i can rebuild it.

 

A few hours at 0% shouldn't be a problem, unless the battery is already pretty far gone. Now, a few days at 0%, and yes, that would be bad, as then the chance of self-discharge below safe levels is much higher. I did misspeak slightly, as my "several hours" really is just however long it will take for your battery to fully discharge. Depending on the notebook, this could take anywhere from 1 hour to 6 or more. As I also stated before, you may wish to check your BIOS. Some notebooks have a BIOS that will perform a calibration for you, which negates the need to babysit your notebook and you'll come back to a fully charged and calibrated system. This does depend on the BIOS, however (I know my Gateway has it).

As for the batteryuniversity.com post from moral hazard, this calibration is not to "prime" the battery, it's to set the battery fuel gauge, as noted here from that same site. Notebook batteries these days are almost all universally "smart" batteries, and the fuel gauge needs to be calibrated occasionally. I wouldn't usually bother calibrating more than every few months, though.

 

I would go farther with saying only every 6 months or if your battery has a noticeable miss reading. I just did min for the first time in a year and it wasn't really off at all. The only thing off was the wear lvl.

 

Yes. It means that.

 

Thank you! Well said!

 

EDIT: nvm...

 

~5% at first start isn't really that bad I've seen some as high as 15% out the box, and if anything, its possibly a misread. Those programs only ESTIMATE what it is, and they have no way of being 100% accurate because each battery is made differently, and has different numbers.

I wouldn't even really worry about it unless you were getting problems with the actual percent left starts wildly varying. To give an idea, I've done more deep discharges than partial ones (or they're roughly even), started with about 5% wear back in August 2009, and I'm at ~21% now (Except for the recent mishap I had cause I left it plugged in for something near 3 weeks).

I'd only recalibrate once every 6-8 weeks personally, some people will say go longer periods, and some people usually end up calibrating it just by how they use it.

 

true min does full drains alot since my laptop only has 60mins of life...its a beast ^^ and yes they are estimated...look at mine battery bar said 26 wear and now it says 18 after a full discharge.

 

Now it's at 3.6%!?

 

that's probably because battery bar is readjusting as you use it. Same thing happened with mine. it went from a bad 26% to 18 lol. It'll take awhile to adjust and get an accurate reading....at least from what i have just seen. Your battery is just fine man. don't worry about it. You'll get a good 2-3 years of use out of it. No worries.

EDIT: that program is constantly reading and adjusting getting more accurate every scan.

 

Exactly. Calibration is supposed to help it figure out exactly where it's supposed to be, as most programs calculate battery wear by measuring the reported capacity against the designed capacity. The problem is, of course, that many programs take the reported capacity from the previously mentioned "fuel gauge", and if that's inaccurate (from repeated small charges/discharges, ec), then the reported wear will also be inaccurate.

 

BatteryBar calculates the wear value using the capacity values the battery reports. It is only for the runtime left that it does it's own unique calculation.

 

well mine has gone from 26% wear to 18% to 14% to 20% from full drains i have done...seems it cant make up its mind. i bet my wear is from 15-20...probably from 17-20%

 

Right, and the reported value comes from the "fuel gauge" integrated into the battery. The problem, as stated before, is that batteries need occasional calibration to make sure that the fuel gauge is accurate; lots of small charges and discharges (which is what usually happens when you keep your notebook plugged in all the time with the battery in, and turn it off to move it around before plugging it back in again) can throw it off.

 

well thats from 3 full discharges so far ^^ Well almost full. its with taking it down to 5% and it hibernates. How do you disable that again? I thought you could do that in windows but i guess 5% is the lowest.

 

If you really want to drain to "0%", you'll probably have to do the last 5% or so in BIOS. I know you used to be able to go all the way in XP, but I don't know about the newest versions of Windows.

 

so boot up in bios and let it sit there until dead?

 

Yes. Although I'd probably run it down to 5% in Windows, and then reboot into BIOS for the last 5%. That way you can keep an eye on it for the last 5 and not worry as much about it sitting after shutoff for too long.

 

gotcha ^^ i'll do that tomorrow at my doctor's appoint ment or on the bus ride back

 

You can adjust the power properties in Windows Vista and 7 for it to do whatever you want when the battery gets low. You can have it sit there until it reaches 0% if you desire.

 

i checked and when i set 0% it sets it back to 5% and you can't select do nothing. it has to go to sleep or shut down or hibernate

 

Weird, it works perfectly fine for me. There should be two settings for low battery though, and one you can't set lower than the other. But of course you can't select to do nothing, but having it set to 0% is effectively telling it to do nothing.

Hang on, I just checked it, and I can select "do nothing" in Vista.

 

i got windows 7 home premium...i bet they changed it oh well bios it is ^^

 

I cannot stress enough how bad an idea it is to drain it to 0%.

But, do what you must. Just know that you'll be buying a battery sooner, rather than later (especially if you do this repeatedly).

 

dude....li-ions are rated to get 300 recharges from 0% and after 300 recharges it has 80% capacity. If i had a 100% brand new battery i could do it 300 times and only have 20% wear/80% capacity left....its not going to do anything to it...shesh. You act like draining to 0% 10 times will ruin it. It might take out 1% of wear at worse case.

 

I'm not worried about it being 'worn out' faster - I'm worried about killing the battery in the first place.

If the protection circuitry decides that the cells are not fit to be recharged; a new battery is the only 'solution'.

 

Draining it to 0% is draining it to the limit those same circuits allow, not draining all the energy from the cells.

 

I know, but will it be plugged in to recharge as soon as it shuts off?

Also, how do you know if the 0% it shuts down at is also the point where it has any reserve capacity left? Answer: you don't.