Different Voltage Battery?

I know the golden rule is that you shouldn't use a battery of a different voltage. However, if there are two laptops with what seems to be identical motherboard and power supply pinouts, could it be possible to use a higher voltage battery in one that comes with a lower voltage with possibly logic on the mainboard that would detect the voltage difference and work accordingly? Maybe wishful thinking?

One is 11.25V the other is 15.2V. I know, a significant difference, but the 11.25V is 30Wh and the 15.2V is 48Wh so over 50% battery life improvement.

Anyone ever run into this and been successful? Why would they make two laptops (one Acer E11 other Acer V11) with higher voltage but identical mainboards? Just one is a touchscreen laptop and the other is not.

 

How similar are the power supply voltages?

This is a really interesting scenario. Hopefully someone has taken the plunge and had success.

 

Noted as 11.25V and 15.2V.

It's a $200 laptop. I'm tempted to give it a try.

 

Isn't the power supply typically higher voltage than the battery?

Edit - I personally have never gone further than 1 volt higher. My guess is that the laptop survived, but who knows.

 

AC Adapter is 19V.

I'm thinking since one laptop has an extra USB port perhaps it needs more voltage. But not sure if that means it won't work with the other one.

 

So both models take a 19V PSU, both have the same Mobo Pinout, and the only difference is in battery voltage.

This is something that I wouldn't be able to resist, but you never know. I would love to hear if it works.

Edit - check out here - http://superuser.com/questions/33207/laptop-battery-is-voltage-really-important-to-respect - they seem to think a similar situation is fine. I have never seen this website before though.

 

For $200 I would put this in the 'educational' expense pile.

There is no reason for it to not work if the power stages are built up enough. But, at that price point it could go with just half a volt difference in each direction.

Again; how much is the educational side of the question pulling you?

 

I think it is similar to ac adapter, amps is what matters.

not going to dig into the science, I suks at EE~, even If i am good at EE, google will give you a better answer.

 

No, for a given load/resistance, R, the Voltage V, will determine how much current I, flows.

The notebook in question is probably not custom designed from the ground up; parts and whole circuits are reused where possible and this gives me some hope that it will work at this higher voltage.

Where you might see a backwards step is in charging. It will take longer to charge the nominally higher voltage battery than the stock one (and not because it is bigger in WH'rs - it is because the charger can only push the same voltage and the voltage delta is smaller with the higher voltage battery).

 

Damn, tiller is better than google.~

 

It seems that some notebooks are able to handle batteries with different voltages: My Samsung NP900X3B was originally shipped with a battery rated at 11.1V and which showed abnormal wear within the first year. It was replaced by Samsung with a battery rated at 7.5V. However, because the battery swap was done by a service centre I didn't have the opportunity to compare the two batteries and whether the batteries used different pins on the connector (the easy solution).

John

 

Good to hear.

It's the voltage drop to a specific point that makes the battery considered "empty" isn't it? It's not the current that drops, it's the voltage over time that results in reduced battery life, right? So a higher voltage would allow it to last longer then, right? I may give it a go. May end up in smoke and tears, I'll try to do it on video too, lol.

 

The Lithium cells operate over a relatively small voltage range between full and empty with a typical cell voltage being about 3.7V. A 7.5 volt battery indicates two lithium cells in series (and one or more sets in parallel depending on overall capacity) and an 11.1 volt battery indicates three lithium cells in series. The batteries include a chip for the charge management. I don't know if the charging circuit in the computer is designed to negotiate with the chip to find out the appropriate charging voltage and there's also the matter of the computer needing to be able to receive the voltage that the battery delivers and convert it to the voltages being used by the different components.

John

 

This ultimately sounds like a bad idea then doesn't it? But it just seems odd how they'd offer two different voltage batteries with the same connector and pinout (at least colors are same) on two nearly identical machines.

 

What? You chickened out?

 

No I didn't chicken out... just haven't had the time yet or received the battery yet. Will likely give it a go.

 

Success! Well at least working initially. Charging it now and will check battery life and if BatteryBar indicates proper Whr and battery life.

 

Wow, it actually works! 8hrs 50mins on the movie loop test compared with 5hrs 20mins with the stock battery! This is a nice little gem of a laptop. Now time to find a nice IPS LCD. It's 30-pin eDP so hopefully something is available. I think I found a glossy panel that will work but so far no luck with a matte. Will have to do some more searching. But I like that this laptop is upgradable. It's three times the performance of the atom CPU based toy notebooks, and this one you can use real RAM and SSD and wireless card not some soldered on non-upgradeable substandard crap. It's still affordable, can't find a laptop similar to this for the price even after upgrading, and it's Win8.1 64-bit no less, 2.2lbs, and 11.6" non touch!

 

HTWingNut, thanks for going forward with this and for providing the videos too. Hope the battery upgrade continues to work as intended. Just curious, does the power adaptor become hotter than previously while it is charging? Does it work less hard (cooler...) if you have the system powered off while charging it? If it is significantly warmer while charging and 'on', I would be charging this with the system off if it keeps it cooler, or, look into buying a beefier charger instead.

Wish the options you had on your netbook (real SSD, RAM and AC WiFi card) were possible with everything out there!

Looking forward to your impressions when you upgrade this platform to Win10 (it will feel like a new machine).

The Atom based (Bay Trail and soon... Cherry Trail) tablets/convertibles like the T100TA do not lack in cpu performance (at least in multithreaded use) and are much more easy on the battery than the Celeron class of processor on your E11. But they are limited (by a huge amount) by 2GB RAM (most of them soldered on) and eMMC storage limitations.

See:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/85474,80268,82103

See:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2388&cmp[]=2059&cmp[]=2301


What I have learned with my T100TA is that 10.1" is too small for my eyes (~12" display would be ideal) even if the IPS display is very, very nice to use. But this Lenovo with all it's goodies is almost too much to ignore.

See:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/lenovo-thinkpad-intel-cherry-trail-desktop,29183.html


With Windows 10 Pro, a fingerprint reader, AC WiFi, a digital pen, 1900x1200 display and a 10 hour battery life... it will be hard to walk away from one if I happen to see one in front of me any time soon (even if the base unit costs more than your entire and nicely upgraded setup).


Thanks again for taking a chance and showing us this is possible, at least for an E11.

 

It is not the Celeron it is the Pentium quad core N3540 7.5W CPU. But yeah, this is why I like this laptop so much is the expansion, two USB ports, and it's an 11.6" matte *laptop* not a tablet hybrid. It weighs 1 lbs less than the T100TA too.

I did check by feel for battery heat, and it didn't feel hot at all. It took a little longer to charge, about 2:30 opposed to a little over 2hrs with stock battery. It seems the actual capacity of the battery has sorted itself out, it's now showing 48.8Whr. And not sure how I can get a beefier power supply, it's already 40W 19V, and power use from wall at peak I've seen is 16W, but typically 12-13W at load. Typical browsing and movies and general Office stuff is about 5-6W on average.

I'm hoping Cherry Trail does bring something significant to the table. Problem is that OEM's will probably gimp it by using single channel RAM, and limited by TDP. And it will probably end up in tablets. I just want a small (i.e. 11.6" or 12.1") *laptop* with decent IPS LCD (1366x768 is fine), 8GB RAM, SSD upgrade options (M.2 is fine too to keep it thin and light), 8hrs battery life, as well as decent wireless. With this laptop I'm 80% there. Just need to find an LCD.

 

Pentium N3540? I am duly impressed.

See:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/82105,85474,80268,82103


Seems like all the aspects of the bigger battery are coming along nicely, including the power adaptor questions I initially had. Well, only one thing left to do now (Win10!).

Enjoy!

 

I may give Win10 a shot. Just hesitant, but I can always revert back, right?

 

No, I wouldn't depend on being able to revert back. (Seriously).

With your easily accessible E11, I would clone your existing installation to a spare drive (even a HDD at this point) and do the upgrade on that. See if you like it and then you can do the same on your main (SSD) drive.

Back up your data though, as usual, before you do anything (even the clone).

 

On this off-topic subject of travel notebooks, mine is my 3 year old Samsung NP900X3B. It did cost a lot more than the E11 and didn't make the grade as my main notebook but takes up very little space in the baggage for when I want to travel light, has an excellent display and the battery is good for around 6 hours. These days it has a 512GB Crucial M550 inside so storage space is not an issue.

John

 

Yeah I have a Samsung NP940X3G. Very nice. Just wish it came with a 1080p matte non-touch LCD. That Samsung is going to my mom as her main daily driver though, her laptop is an old 15" Dell about 6 lbs and fat for very little performance. And I like something inexpensive in the case that it gets stolen or broken. I leave mine in the car a lot usually during the week and only charge it on weekends or if it gets used heavily then that night.

 

This is awesome. Thanks for reporting your results.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I've always found it strange when people ask about increasing battery time and seldom think of using a higher capacity battery.

 

This isn't just a higher capacity battery - it is also significantly higher voltage too.

 

Right. That was the issue. If it was an 11.1-11.5V battery to begin with (since stock was 11.2) I wouldn't hesitate. But since it's 15.2V vs 11.2V it's definitely a questionable endeavor.

If you notice I did find an 11.4V battery (odd) that I tried and had 36Whr compared to 30Whr of stock but didn't seem to make much difference in battery life.

 

HTWingNut, since you've obviously invested more in extending useful battery life than most big corp's in the last 50 years, I name you CoBOUM (Chief of Battery Operations of the Universe Man, pronounced 'koboom' ).

I need to you step up and make sure all manufacturer's know this trick; throw smaller (but more) battery cells to increase the voltage, lower the amps and provide for a cooler running battery while they're at it and also greatly increase battery run time in most notebooks for no extra charge except the battery itself.

I hope you accept this appointment seriously and promise to fight weak battery packs everywhere.

Anyone else nominate HTWingNut for this auspicious position?

Hail, hail our new battery power king!


(Okay... now I'll try to sleep after... 22 hrs work...)...

 

I second the nomination

 

??? It's also significantly less than the adapter voltage supply.

 

LOL?


I'm sure companies have their reasons but clearly it's not to offer better battery life for their customers. It's stuff like this that bugs me. They offer a higher Whr battery in a similar laptop, but ONLY for that other laptop, not even an option for this laptop, even though it works fine.

And that other 36Whr battery I showed, one cell completely missing, replaced by a plastic filler. Seriously? Charge the extra $2 to the customer and give them 25% more battery life. It will make them look like heroes instead of trolls.

Right, voltage adapter is 19V, 40W. Still enough potential difference for a decent charge rate.

 

Ok, I have an Asus X551M Laptop, according to a number of forums the correct battery is an A31N1319 and according to images in those forums the voltage of that battery is 11.25 Volts. Now, Looking that the Power Adapter supplied with the Laptop, it is rated at 19 Volts output... so my obvious question is, would this not fry the battery considering it is rated at almost 8 volts less or just under 2/3 the voltage of the adapter?

 

The answer lies in the fact that it is not directly connected to the battery.

Also, a battery attached to an adaptor that is the same nominal voltage would never charge either. There has to be a potential difference between the two to make the electrons flow and have the battery store the excess electrons.

 

Ok thank-you for that information