Dv5t excessive battery wear?

Does anybody else with a dv5t have excessive battery wear? I purchased the laptop in August of 2008. According to hwmonitor my battery can only hold 30758 mwh down from the designed capacity of 47520 mwh. I rarely used the battery. Maybe once a week for 5 minutes to move the laptop.

I asked a friend with a dv5t purchased around the same time and his capacity is down to nearly 27000 mwh. Our laptops are the same except his has the intel integrated graphics while i got the 9600m gt. Also he uses the battery almost daily.

When i first got the laptop i got nearly 2 hours out of it. Now i can barely get an hour.

We both calibrated our batteries a few times by fully discharging and fully charging a few times which did nothing.

I know that batteries experience wear but does this seem excessive? I believe the estimate is about 10% a year. But this is almost 50% wear in a year and a half.

 

hmm, I jsut got my battery changed out under warranty due to it never showing 100% charge, but it's wear level was something like 6%, which was about 52000mwh (I had the 55kwh battery)

 

what is the watt rating of your adapter?

 

its a 90 watt adapter. i think my friends is a 65 watt.

 

So, when you don't use the battery you have it stored in a cool place with about 60% charge?

Having the battery in laptop all the time exposes it to constant discharge and charge cycles, for example down to 93-97% then up to 100%, back to 93-97%... depending on how heavy use, that could happen couple times in an hour. Typical laptop battery starts showing degraded performance after 300-400 cycles but in real life you will get lots of different results depending on laptop model/make.

 

Battery wear when kept in the laptop has got nothing to do with cycles, it's got to do with heat. Laptops get hot. Batteries don't like heat. So, batteries wear out.

 

Sorry, but I have to say you're both right, in different ways. There are many factors that come into play with battery deterioration. Charge speed and discharge speed, total number of cycles, heat, cleanliness of electricity being fed into it, and more.

The only way to differentiate between excessive (premature) deterioration, due to either user or manufacturer error, is to try a second battery.

Bottom line: Quit worrying about it and use it until it doesn't hold a charge. Then buy a second battery and test it. If the second one does the same thing, you're either doing something wrong (reasons are above, eliminate ALL of them) or there's a widespread problem. Trying to prove the latter to HP without a huge userbase complaining about it will be like pulling teeth.

 

That's true. However sustained heat is usually the main culprit - along with keeping the battery at 100% which the charger does.

 

I believe you 100% that heat contributes to the death of a battery, but it's not the only property that matters.

To say it's the main culprit would be like saying running your vehicle's engine (even at idle) is the reason for the death of its engine. Sure, heat is involved, but so are a lot of other things.

 

For the first few months i didnt have a cooler so it got pretty toasty, but after that it was on a cooler pretty much all the time. I feel like it wasnt due to heat because my friends laptop has the integrated graphics which never even gets warm and his battery is just as worn as mine.

Its not really a big deal to me since i dont really use it but its kinda annoying that the battery is half gone in a year in a half.

 

You should be fortunate. I had a dv6000 series a few years ago that held a 30-minute charge after owning it for 10 months.

 

I have a dv6700t for about two years now (12 cell battery) ... just put in batterybar... it says I have 3:50 hours at full charge... I do take the battery out about 50% of the time when the Laptop is sitting plugged in, which is a good deal of the time. If Batterybar is correct then my battery still is doing pretty well after two years....

BTW, I updated the bios when I first bought the laptop to v 51a (which incidently is no longer offered at HP downloads) and the laptop runs very cool, which may have something to do with it.

Ken

 

I just checked my battery, it's about 92% right now (88128/05040mWh), I have the 12-cell, that's after about 13 months of ownership of my laptop (not sure what the manufacture date of the battery is, I believe when I last checked it was April 08, so the battery itself might be about 20 months old already). That's about 8% lost. During the school year, it's almost daily, but lately I've been doing charge cycles twice a week since that's how often I need it. I try to drain my battery to about 40%, then take it out and leave my laptop plugged in. Also good to store it in a cool place, regardless it will degrade over time. One thing you might want to check out is how old the battery is, if there is a date on it somewhere of when it was manufactured, and figure out how old it is, not from the time you bought it, but from when it was manufactured, as batteries do degrade once they're off the assembly, perhaps your battery was just a really old one.

 

SDreamer. are you saying that 3.50 hours at full charge is worn out? As I recall most 6 cell batteries last about 2 hours. also, since I just installed Batterybar, I'm not sure it has had enough time to get an accurate measurment.

How may hours does your 12 cell report at full charge.

Ken

 

My DV5Z battery died in less than 10 months of use and its wear was at 95% and the thing constantly ran hot even cleaning out the vents

and yes heat will kill the battery longitivity