W520 battery goes from 60% to 5% in about a minute

I've got the "Power Manager 3" configured to "start charging" (meaning I plug the battery AC cord back in) at 65% and stop charging at 90%. I've also got the "Alarms" set to: Low Battery Alarm at 60%/do nothing and the Critically Low Battery Alarm set to 45%/do nothing.

However, if I'm away from my notebook when the battery gets to around 60% or so, it will drop all the way down to 5% in under five minutes. No "now we're at 55%, now we're at 40%, now we're at 35%" giving me plenty of warning to plug the cord back in.

The battery is rated now (four years old) at "Good+". Is there some setting I can select to allow the battery to just continue to drop at a steady rate rather than precipitously? Or some setting I've selected erroneously that is forcing it to drop like this? Thanks.

 

What you've described sounds like one or more blown cells to me. Time to start shopping for a replacement.

 

Yeah, no matter what Power Manager is telling you about its health, if it drops like that, your battery is shot.

 

Four years is a long time for a battery.

 

Any suggestions for a "new" one? Apparently the OEM one isn't available.

 

I've had good luck with "refurbished" batteries from NewEgg, which were all genuine Lenovo with 0 cycles. YMMV.

These systems are not *that* old. You should be able to locate a genuine battery on feebay. Another idea would be to post a WTB (want to buy) ad on the TPF.

Do bear in mind that these batteries were used in T410/420, T510/520 and W510/520 so anything you find along those lines will work.

Good luck.

 

One more thing: if you really need to rely on having a few hours of battery autonomy, you might want to go with a brand name or original lenovo (if you can find it).
Things like the W520 can be quite the power hogs, and I observed with my W510+cheapo replacement battery that when it chews through 30-40W, the voltage on the battery soon drops below some 10.x V threshold, causing a sudden shutdown, even with 50% capacity left. One can monitor that, and mitigate it by reducing the load, but it's not very convenient.

 

The batteries that came out for the #30 series should still work in the older models, and they're still available directly from Lenovo.