Normal battery wear?

Hi, I got my first Thinkpad this last April, and I've recently discovered the freeware program, BatteryBar. This program tells you the "battery wear" of your battery. In the Thinkpad Power manager, this percentage is:
(1-{Full charge capacity}/{Design capacity})*100

I was wondering what a "normal" battery wear is, and when to expect my battery to (eventually) die.

Currently I've done 70 charge cycles, with ~11% battery wear.

What mostly concerns me is that my previous laptop only has 16% wear, even though it is ~3 years old (compared to my 6 month old thinkpad)

Any thoughts?
Many thanks

 

which thinkpads do you have and what is the brand of the cells that the battery uses?

 

I have a T410s, and a battery made by manufacturer "SANYO".

My older laptop is a Gateway MX8734, with a 6-cell battery that either could be "SANYO" or "SIMPLO".

 

for recent Sanyo batteries this is 'considered' normal. Sanyo batteries are like Lada cars...

 

Omg you know those soviet cars ?
My R400 has Sanyo as well, I secretely expected it to have Panasonic, but it doesnt.
Dont know how will it last, got it only yesterday.

 

Mine (in a R400) is a Sanyo too and already it shows some sign of wear. I started using the battery in May 2010. It is supposed to have a full charge of 51.98 W and it currently has 51.54W. Cycle count is 17. I have set Power manager to calibrate the battery on its own.

 

Sanyo battery failure is not something that you can predict with any accuracy, but if the charge capacity starts to drop off very fast in the first 50 charge. then you should expect that your battery would probably die a premature death (relatively speaking).

 

I have 41 cycles in my Sanyo since March and I am already down to 96% (so about 10 cycles = 1% loss). I wished my Sanyo was as good as their Eneloop batteries.

 

10 cycles to 1% isn't too terribly bad if you think about it. That puts you at 1/3 capacity after 300 cycles which isn't too far off average for a lithium ion.

At the rate you are using your battery it should last you a good while. Consider also that lithium ion 'tends' to have a slightly faster initial drop off, followed by a period of use where it wears a little slower, followed by another accelerated drop off rate.

To the original poster, I'm a bit more skeptical of the 3 year old battery only reporting 16 percent wear. That doesn't seem accurate to me under anything but the most ideal conditions (ie: not using the battery much, keeping it around 40-50 percent charge).

 

Sanyo or not, none of the battery wear experiences stated in this thread are out of the ordinary. On the contrary I have seen much worse.

OP: 11% wear for 6 months and 70 cycles is on par or better than my experiences with any ThinkPad battery (regardless of manufacturer: Sony, Sanyo, Panasonic).

I however find it hard to believe that the wear on your 3 year old battery is only 16% factually unless it went through a minimal number of cycles and it was added a touch of luck and magic. I would suggest you run some real life draining tests of the battery and come back with the results. How many hours does it last compared to when it was new? I am very suspicious that it will drain much more than just 16% compared to new level.

I have more than once (both with batteries for my ThinkPad and other laptop brands) found that there might be a misalignment in what the battery manager software reports and the factual remaining battery level. Probably due to a malfunctioning chip or the like. Sometimes a battery gauge reset in ThinkPad Power Manager will not fix this.

 

NeeGo: That'd be ~6 cycles = 1% loss for me...

JabbaJabba: I will admit that I mainly had my 3 year old laptop on AC power for most of it's life (maybe totaling 100 charging cycles). In your experiences, how long does a Thinkpad battery last, on average? I have never really noticed a drop in charge for any of the laptops I have used, so this "battery wearing out quickly" thing is quite shocking to me.


I've read somewhere (i.e. replacement battery selling websites) that batteries wear out quickly for the first several percentages, then "level off"... Is there any validity to this claim?

Many thanks for the replies.

 

yes certainly battery does level off, but usually that should occur within 20 charge cycles.

My X200 Sanyo battery is already down to 54% of its capacity after 160 charges cycles. While another one is at 120 charge cycle and still holds 87% of its capacity.