Is It True that Lithium Batteries Live 15 months

Two Best Buy salesmen independently told me today that no matter what notebook I buy, in the 15"-16" category, intel i3, i5, or i7, the 6 cell lithium battery will die in about 15 months. They advised that there are only so many recharges available...and advised that if the notebook will be plugged in, to take its battery out, that may add a couple of months of life to the battery. I haven't owned a notebook in several years, is this information correct? Why don't PCs simply adopt the polymer 8 hr batteries in the Apple Macbooks?

 

Depends on how you treat them and how you use them. I have a 2 year and a half old one and it is still holding up great. I know that Lenovo offers a 3 year warranty on their batteries, so you may want to look into that if you are worried. (I assume other major companies do as well for a reasonable price)

 

I moved your post to the hardware section where it will be noticed
This thread has some good battery info

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...et-upgrades/91846-notebook-battery-guide.html






Alex

 

All batteries are affected by heat and discharge cycles. The more you use the battery, the sooner it will die. When they told you about taking the battery out when its plugged in, it will prolong your battery life, but usually its only worth the trouble if you leave it on your desk for more than 2 weeks. As for Apples polymer batteries, they're still lithium ion and are subject to the same tolerances.

 

I have a 27-month old battery which still holds charge enough to run my laptop for 2 hours.

Aging is a factor in battery life but more importantly it depends on how many times you charge/discharge your battery.


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did this 'discussion' at BB happen to be book-ended with their attempts to sell you a service contract?

 

okay im bored so here goes.

1: they CAN die in 15 mos, but if you dont overheat the battery, and cycle it occasionally it should last much longer. I have many exceeding 36 mos of continual use now, even one or 2 at 48mos. ( I rarely keep a laptop that long )

2: some batteries from HP and ASUS are Boston power units which are WARRANTIED for 3 full years. you can also get them as replacements for many models.

Welcome to DrBattery.com - Green Series Battery - Green The Earth

3: Li-ion and Li-po batteries are essentially the same it is just that the main difference is that the polymer cells are made in flat sheets so you can add a higher density. the life of the battery is more depandant on how fast you charge it. My MBP takes well over 4 hours to fully charge ... my Alien and My HP Elitebook take under 2.

dont you love salesmen who are blowing smoke out of random orifices and feeding bad information?

Thanks Tomcat for digging up the battery thread, I had misplaced it.

as for my wisecrack comment for the night

why dont Apple put the 12 hour batteries in like ASUS ansd Acer ???? its all engineering and tradeoffs.

 

I have Toshiba A300D 2 years old, never took out the battery, its pluged in non-stop and it lasts just as long as when it was bought.

 

I'm typing right now--on battery power--on an Asus I bought in 2003, the Asus M2N. Thing is, I bought a spare, and have been swapping the two every two or three months since.

I originally got roughly 5 hours on each; today, seven years later, I still get about 3.5 hours on each!

The other thing I've done is, once a year or so, run the Asus callibration utility from the BIOS, as the salesman told me to do.

I bought this for traveling and writing around China and Southeast Asia, and there were long train/bus rides with no power, or it flickered so much I'd avoid plugging in until getting to a bigger town. So I needed lots of battery life.

Furthermore, I have plenty of 5 yr old lithium batteries for my camera, and they still give me power for days.

Cell phone? Four years old and battery still stays charged for days.

 

I highly doubt that.

 

Maybe I mostly lost 10%, but that is all. When i got the laptop, i had 1 hour and 30 minutes, and now I have about 1 hour and 20 minutes

 

Small correction: on a base of 90 minutes, you actually lost 12.5% then.

 

Is somebody a fan of Sheldon on BIG BANG THEORY? Or, perhaps, one of the characters he parodies, such as Spock? ^_^

 

Lol............

 

> Two Best Buy salesmen independently told me today that no matter what notebook I buy, in the 15"-16" category, intel i3, i5, or i7, the 6 cell lithium battery will die in about 15 months.

Some what correct, on average, if the battery is used frequently.

> They advised that there are only so many recharges available

Correct.

> and advised that if the notebook will be plugged in, to take its battery out, that may add a couple of months of life to the battery.

Correct. Sometimes a Li-ion battery can last years though.

> Why don't PCs simply adopt the polymer 8 hr batteries in the Apple Macbooks?

The reason is probably cost related.

The use of Lithium Polymer batteries is not restricted to Apple. My HP DM3 had it too for example.

A Lithium Polymer battery doesn't warrant long battery life. Long battery life is a combination of low power consumption + high battery capacity.

 

The Best Buy salesmen are either woefully uninformed or deliberately lying to you in order to sell you something. I have a 15.4" laptop (Compal JFL92) from February 2008 (i.e. more than 30 months old now) and its battery is not significantly different than it was when I first bought it. I've never drained the battery completely so I can only estimate based on what it reports, but to get down to 50% used to take a little under 2 hours and it still takes that much -- the difference is no more than 5 minutes. Strangely, Windows reports the current capacity to be exactly equal to the design capacity (which is somewhat surprising after 2.5 years, but that's what it says).

And no, you don't need to take out the battery when it is plugged in. This used to be necessary a long time ago because the batteries were not clever enough to know when to stop charging, but they've implemented software/firmware solutions for this a few years back. My laptop is plugged in at least 95% of the time and I've only taken the battery out for maintenance and it's still perfectly fine. The important parameter is how often you use the battery: if you fully drain it every day and charge it every night, it won't last very long, but if you only use it once in a while, you should be OK for years.

 

The salesman can very much be right. It depends on how you use it. I used to use my nx9420 multiple times a day, draining the battery and recharging all the way up (HP's business notebooks use a fast charge-90% in 90 minutes). I used it for heavy performance demanding apps (and thus pushed out a lot of heat). Over the course of 2 years I had 2 batteries-one for year 1 and another for year 2. For each battery, after a year of use, only about 8 minutes of battery was possible.

On the other hand, my brother's Compaq V2000 near 6 years has virtually the same battery life. Again, it depends on a number of variable. Charge/discharge cycles (and when you charge them), how fast it is charged, temperature, and more.

 

Thanks for the informed, yet somewhat contradictory, responses. I realize this issue is kicked around often on the Forum, but with each new version of Intel processors, I figure it deserves some new attention. The BB guys who were advising me weren't trying to sell me, but then again, I was just typing on a display Samsung laptop at the time, not really coming to the "close, close, close" the sale point...and frankly, I usually don't ask a computer salesman any questions that I already don't know the answers to....it's quality control, to sort of test them out. But I will say that the BB guys made it a point to tell me they don't work on commissions, yet were eager to tell me their name and when their working hours were....maybe they don't work on commissions, just sales incentives ...

ANYWAY, since you all asked, I plan to use generally a new laptop for office mainstream use, plugged in almost all of the time. I'm still unclear whether to make it a general practice to leave the battery inside the computer when it is plugged in, (I understand the issue of a potential power failure and having battery backup), but because of extremely attractive pricing, I am thinking of purchasing an i5 processor with a 6 cell battery (no 12 cells available for Samsung), so I don't want to unnecessarily drain the battery and increase my operating costs...

 

Sigh. I'm no battery engineer but I've been using laptops for ten plus years, probably used/owned/leased over a dozen laptops during that time and all I can say is use your laptop, keep the battery in it at all times even if its plugged in. Removing it won't hurt it really if you discharge it to about 50% and store it in a cool dry place for extended periods, but then you'll still have to charge it every few months, and it will still lose life over that time. Not to mention that occasion where you unplug your laptop not remembering you have to install the battery and *poof* there goes all your work.

Granted it all depends on the charging algorithms used and the quality of the battery. My Sager is over a year old, has been plugged in 24/7 except for a few dozen hours of use on battery and still has < 4% battery wear. I make sure I do a full discharge cycle every six months to ensure calibration, and just did one recently and I'm at 3.7% battery wear. Heck even my netbook which is fairly new, but has been turned on primarily using battery with well over a hundred hours of on time with battery has only lost 4% life. But most new notebooks manage batteries quite well and use decent batteries.

From my experience, I'd expect a battery to start losing charge more quickly after about 24 months.

 

Anecdotal evidence shows extremes. It does not discount the more practical "average" battery life which is what I believe his salesman was inferring to: the battery shelf live.

 

My battery after 2 years was still at 85% health and I never removed it.

 

Lots of people giving anecdotal evidence here.

The average life time expectance of a lithium-ion battery will be somewhere between 1 and 2 years I reckon. So in essence the sales man is probably not far off.

 

Can anyone tell me if there are any other companies that offer a 3 year warranty on batteries(No questions asked) like Lenovo does?

 

If that's true I'd certainly like to know if there's any "fine print" to that warranty: what do they cover should it fail?

Remember, a warranty is only as good as the company that support it. If you doubt that, read my thread on HP warranty

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-compaq-voodoo-pc/480861-laptop-will-not-power.html

 

"If You purchase a Battery Warranty Extension, You are entitled to one Battery replacement during the
entire term of the Service Agreement (3, 4, or 5 years). The term begins after your one year Battery base
warranty period and ends after Your initial and only replacement request is received."

No real shifty business going on, but the only downer is that the warranty cost $140. I'm sure few people can take full advantage of it.(I believe 9 cells are the only battery that costs more than the warranty.)

 

Whoa! That's the cost of a new battery. So it's only a deal if what you say about 9 cell is true. Personally I eschew extended warranties.

Do you know anyone whose actually used that warranty?

 

HP and ASUS do in some models with the Boston Power batteries, ot the replacements batteries I linked to in my first response. I am quite sure there are now many aftermarket parts with 3 year batteries now

http://www.drbattery.com/boston-power-green-series-battery.aspx

 

Do laptop battery packs use 18650 cell batteries? If so, I assume there is some form of protection circuit. So, why is it bad to constantly leave the battery in while the laptop is plugged in? Won't the protection circuit simply stop it from charging?

 

yes many of the bats I crack open use 18650's and have the charge and protection circuit inplace. it will stop it from charging but the cell will slowly discharge and then the circuit will trip and charge again. but at any rate I never pull batteries.

 

Heat! The the biggest concern when your laptops operation. Not the best environment for batteries. And I doubt any manufacture will give a warranty on a battery of over a year (90 days for most generic aftermarket batteries) unless you pay for it. Which is an inadvisable direction to take.

 

Heat is one reason. The second reason is that Li-ion deteriorates much quicker when it's fully charged. It lasts longest when it's charged at 40%.

Battery University - Storing and priming of batteries

 

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see:

I don't know what the battery makers did, but based on my laptop, this does not appear to be true anymore. I've tried to find some info about this that is both recent and non-anecdotal, but it is surprisingly difficult.

 

Quality of the cells makes a big difference in the lifetime of a battery pack.

A recent example for me is a battery that I bought for my cell phone. I had a Samsung OEM battery that I got easily two years out of with constant use. I could easily go 3-4 days between charges. My new battery which is a cheap Chinese knock off is a few months old and fading fast. The first couple of weeks of use it would hold a charge and keep my phone powered on for 4 days between charges, now I have to charge every couple of days.

Because the types of batteries in cell phone are pretty much the same thing, I know this correlates to laptop battery packs as well.

It’s funny how that battery university article keeps popping up in conversation. It is outdated but probably is valid for the most part. But processes for battery manufacturing continues to improve so I would like to see more recent information.

 

Of course it does. In fact, it most likely is the biggest factor in battery longevity. Thing is, manufactures don't publish this information. The best you can do is look for a name brand and hope for the best.

That's because it's still the de facto standard for batteries. Even though lithium ion batteries continue to improve (marginally) the technology is still basically the same.

 

I don't think so. The technology is still Lithium-Ion, but they've clearly made some changes (it's either that or I've got a magical battery that should be at ~60% but somehow manages to stay at 95%+). I think that article keeps popping up despite being more than half a decade old because there just isn't anything better online. That website is very comprehensive, it's too bad nobody has updated it for so long.

 

Battery manufactures have always been vague when it comes to specifying charge cycles or battery longevity, they just don’t have enough control over how batteries are charged and discharged to safely publish any kind of numbers.

I agree the changes would be more than modest. From my real world experience, I know the changes that NiMH went through from the days when they first came out till now is very large. Metal nickel hydride batteries had a ways to go to catch up and surpass nickel cadmiums. The capacity levels were pretty close, but the internal impedance was a lot higher, now the capacities are really good and more importantly the internal impedance has dropped to really low levels.