Prolonging Battery Life

Hi Everyone,

Ok, I heard that if we charge the battery when it is not low (as of 10% remaining) the battery will shorten it's lifetime. I'm wondering if there is any truth to this.

But after doing some googling I found this website which states we should not do full discharges and recharge as that will shorten the battery lifetime.

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

Anyone wanna comment on this?

-Tony

 

Hey Tonynca,

If you have not already done so, you may want to take a look at this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=91846

 

Hi Tonynca,

I believe that website. In order not to shorten its life span, you just remember not to discharge your battery to 0% as well as charge it to 100% .

I know that there are still opposite opinions about this issue and IMO this is only because of the co-existence of several generations of batteries nowadays. If your battery is of the Lithium-ion type, like most of the modern laptops these days, there is no need to worry about partial charge and discharge since they do not harm your battery at all.

 

Just treat the battery with respect and it will be fine.

The main thing to be concerned about is topping it off all the time for no reason. Example: use the laptop on battery for 15 mintutes, drop down to 94%, plug it in, charge to 100%, repeat. This is the pattern that kills Li-Ion batteries as they prefer to live in the middle (20-80%) rather than the extremes (0% or 100%).

Running a battery all the way to 0% (not the 5% auto-hibernate, but the actual voltage cutoff circuit on the battery) is also damaging. This should be avoided unless you are trying to recalibrate (once every 30 cycles or so).

I suggest you just set yourself some charge thresholds (e.g. start charging at 60% and stop at 95%). This will prevent little top off charges, keep your battery from being at 100% while warm (e.g. plugged in computer), while still providing enough battery life for you to do what you need at a moments notice.

To set the charge thresholds launch Lenovo power manager (right click on the battery icon on the taskbar). Switch to advanced, battery, and click battery maintenance. Choose custom, and set your desired thresholds (I use 60%/95%). You may want to consider charging it all the way (100%) every 30 cycles or so (change the thresholds) just to keep the battery properly calibrated.

 

This is great information.

 

anyway we could check to see the status of battery wear?

 

If you download a program called Rightmark CPU Clock Utility you can check your battery wear.
Tim

 

THX, this is great info.. It has been very helpful for me And your Sig is very original IMO THX

 

Thanks. Zaz had a picture sig, and I figured I have a tablet w/ Wacom digitizer so I might as well use it (Handwriting is much prettier than text).

 

The included Lenovo power manager provides this information.

Switch to advanced view and the battery tab. You should see a large amount of useful information.

The most important ones are cycle count, design capacity, and full charge capacity.

When a battery is new, you may find that "full charge capacity" > "design capacity" (my 8 cell is designed at 66WHr, but still holds 70WHr). However, over time (as cycle count increases) "full charge capacity" will go down (after 5 years and 500+ cycles my 47WHr T40 battery would only hold about 7WHr (although it would run about 20 minutes after it hit 0% due to excessive cycling and loss of calibration).

You can use this information to decide when you need to get a new battery to augment/replace your existing one. However, as a general rule I would expect that after 200 cycles charge capacity will have dropped by 30+% and you may want to consider a replacement.