How manufacturers preserve batteries. Which is best?

I only have firsthand experience with lenovo and asus.

It is general knowledge that keeping lithium ion batteries at full charge for a long time is bad for them.

lenovo allows you to cap battery charge at 60%.

Asus continually discharges and recharges the battery by 5%, between 95%-100%

How does Asus' method even preserve batteries?

 

In my experience, I've found that keeping the battery at full charge vs at 66% (via Lenovo's utility) is not really going to produce a major difference. A while back, both me and a buddy bought Y50s - he set his to stop charging at 66% and I didn't bother with mine and left it at 100% - about 1.5 years later, my battery's total capacity has degraded by 11% whereas his by 8-9% - it's really just irrelevant with modern batteries.

 

Or whatever battery pack Lenove gave you had very conservative calibration.

 

Thing is - even after 6 months at 100% constantly being plugged in, my GL502's battery is at 2% wear - again, batteries are a lot more durable than it appears at first glance.

 

Does not matter kept plugged in or discharged/plugin the battery will eventually run the lifespan itself regardless. Batteries don't last forever unless there is development in a new forum of battery that eliminates memory charges.

 

Just don't worry about it. I've had batteries for years in laptops that are kept at over 95% charge 90% of the time and after several years have less than 10% wear. Not only that, most replacement batteries cost less than $50. I'm not going to stress over saving a few % battery charge capacity.

 

Battery wear percentage is a completely meaningless number.

According to hwinfo64, my asus k53TA is at 8% wear after 5.5 years, but it can only hold a charge for less than 1.5 hours under light load, with lcd at dimmest setting.
It sat on my desk all the time, rarely ever unplugged. Then recently there was a power outage, and I was forced to use the battery. That's how I discovered the 1.5 hour battery life.

When the battery was new, it would last ~5 hours or more under light load.
So yes, battery capacity will dwindle greatly whether you use it or not.

It says it still has 53whr capacity, even after the computer shut off after 1.5 hours, and battery was always at 100%, since asus didn't use the 5% discharge cycle feature at that time.

Now I'm wondering if the current 5% battery discharge cycle is to exercise the ions in the whole battery pack so they don't get stale or something.

 

Have you done a gauge reset? That should be done every 6 months so as to maintain accurate readings.

 

Right. You need to drain it completely a couple times a year to properly calibrate it. Once it's been drained, your percentage should show more accurate representation.

 

yeah, well i'm not too concerned about the reading, as I rarely use that laptop anymore.
Regardless of what the reading says, I just know that after 1.5 hours, the battery juice is completely gone.

 

And after six years, even if it was managed, it likely would be nearly just as bad. Batteries degrade over time regardless of how well you store or use them.

 

I would like a input from @t456 on the topic

 

Too much credit ...

But yes, link626 is right; the battery wear percentage is often a fairly useless indicator. Calibration is difficult at any rate and especially so if you have it plugged in almost all the time (no input data, after all). Have a year-old ZBook 15 G2 (charged to 100%) which has had only a few battery-drawn instances and it still insists ' wear level = 0.0%'. If a full discharge does not help in getting an accurate value then run a battery benchmark tool such as Battery Eater. Would be nice to compare the run-time of those two Y50s, for instance.

Whether you use Battery Eater or simply let it drain completely, do make sure to set 'Power Options' to leave only 1% or even 0% in reserve:

Spoiler: Power Options, battery reserve levels

You'll hopefully get a new, calibrated wear value and especially the lower end of a Li-Ion cell is hard to measure, being very non-linear.

Could also try to let it drain while booting to DOS or simply entering the bios menu and leaving it like that. This way there's no software-based conservation shenanigans that can obstruct an accurate measurement. And, better still, the drain will be constant rather than swinging wildly to to varying workloads, which'd make wear assessment a lot easier.

 

Lenovo already have such a feature built into their Energy Manager app - its readings are different to what other free-ware apps report. While Aida64 insists wear is at 3%, EM reports 11% - and runtimes do remain similar. On day 1 I could get about 3.5 hours of browsing. Now I get slightly over 3 hours.

 

Sometimes I feel budget laptops has better software like Lenovo Energy Manager, Dell Quick Set and other utilities from OEMs. I feel gaming PCs also must have it whether you use it or not, sometimes it helps. OEMs thinks End users buying Gaming lappies will eventually buy new PC to replace worn out ones, that way they could pocket some cash.

 

Not all OEMs add those though - only the ones who also produce business devices - Asus have their useless RoG centre. It even has its own damn key instead of Num Lock - I REALLY want my num lock back >.>

Dell, HP and Lenovo are the ones who put a bit of extra care in their software from my experience.

 

Even I don't have a NUM key on AW 15 because it doesn't come with numeric keys on the right side, its restricted to 17 only.