CF30 Battery, strange behavior

Hi all, it is some time that I'm observing a strange behavior of my CF-30 battery.
If I plug the laptop to the charger, turn it on, then use it, the unplug it, everything is fine. Battery duration is good.
If I take the charged laptop after not so much time that it was unplugged and turn it on, it is also fine.
But if I leave the laptop unplugged for 3-4 days, it won't turn on.
So, battery is self discharging, you may thing... Wrong, at least, it's not so clear, because when I plug it and turn it on, battery indicator shows 95% of charge. Then, it begins to charge it and in a short time goes to 99%, then it stays quite a long time charging at 99%, and finally goes up to 100%.
Any idea? Is there some way to recalibrate the battery -if that could be the issue?

 

OEM or aftermarket battery?

 

OEM battery... but it was used, it came with the laptop, I don't know how much it was used...

 

What is the full model number of the 30, GPS installed?

 

CF30FQSAXAO-BW, but it has been a little modified... I think also from the reseller.
Yes, it has the GPS, but just in theory... I was never able to get it working for more than one second...
Anyway, I forgot to mention one thing: when it doesn't turn on, like if the battery were completely dead, if I turn it on with the charger and then almost immediately remove the charger, it remains on, so the battery is not dead at all.

 

With strange battery behavior I always check these two things first.
First is the power port connector. Wiggle the AC plug where it goes into the CF30...Does the charging LED flash?
Second is the connector assembly for the battery that's inside the CF30.

Please tell us what modifications have been done..

My first guess is the power port connector is going bad..

 

Power port connector is fine. The charging led turns on orange immediately.
Internal connector assembly I think is fine too, once the charger is plugged everything works instantaneously.
About the modifications... I personally changed the WAN card to have it working in Europe and also the WiFi card. And put a SSD too. I'm not sure about the modifications that may have been done by the reseller, I think to remember that, when I checked the original configuration, there was some difference in RAM, WAN and something else.
Anyway, at the beginning I never noticed this issue with the battery, so I don't think it is a problem of internal hardware.

 

You might be having internal problems in your battery. Myself I would try another battery

 

Indeed, but since they are quite expensive, I hoped that there was some calibration software available before going to that.
With some old laptop I had, it worked...

 

The calibration is done with circuitry inside the battery.....The Panasonic battery calibration software just measures the batteries power cycle and matches Windows built in battery meter with the batteries internal circuitry...These are Lithium Ion batteries and must be regulated internally......

You have a hardware problem..Either the connectors inside the laptop or the battery itself...

 

Yes I know that the circuit is internal to the battery, but in older laptop it was possible to recalibrate the 0%-100% charge level by fully charging the battery, running the program until the battery was completely drain. In this way, you were able to restore a reliable reading of the battery capacity.
It seems to me that the battery is giving wrong information to the computer because, as I said, once the computer is on, the battery is capable to power it up. The problem is just and only at switch-on, when the computer remained unplugged for some time.

 

gpc... click on F9 at boot. It will take you into the Battery Recalibration menu.

Do it tonight... Report back tomorrow!

 

I guess that "gps" was me --- I was faster than your edit
Good to know! I will try it tomorrow, now the laptop is working with my telescope, I cannot stop it!

 

You are thinking of OLD laptops with Nickle Cadmium or Nickle metal Hydride batteries....
The new laptops have Lithium Ion batteries.....Very different technology.

Here is some Toughbook battery information for everyone.

If you take 2 of the same model Toughbook and 2 batteries.
Do the magic recalibrate on them both...
Pull the batteries and reinsert them. Each Toughbook will say NO battery recalibration is needed that it was just done.
BUT swap the batteries between Toughbooks, BOTH Toughbooks will tell you the batteries need calibrated.


I am personally convinced. recalibrating a battery does nothing more than "meter" the batteries life so the BIOS and Operating Systems gauge can report accurately. The gauge gets it's information by reading what the BIOS says.
The BIOS and gauge has zero to do with how the battery actually operates. That is completely determined by the batteries internal circuitry. This is for safety reasons. Lithium Ion batteries are VERY explosive..

The battery is controlled by a temperature sensor inside the battery and the internal circuitry that keeps a record of every actual battery cycle and voltages.....This record MUST stay with each battery to maintain safety...If it was controlled / recorded by the Operating System or by the individual Toughbook, then overcharging / overheating and explosions would be possible. Every time someone reformats a drive or flashed a BIOS the battery records would be lost.. That can not be permitted to happen..It is ALL stored inside the battery...
This is also why you can not put new cells inside any current Toughbook battery. If the magic recalibration actually did anything, then after you have celled a battery, you could run recalibrate and the battery would be as good as new. recalibrate would check the cells, find they are new and everything would be sunny.........I can tell you positively that this doesn't happen. Once that battery circuitry finds the battery to be out of specification, it is done. The circuitry locks the battery out. The internal circuitry of the battery has complete control of the battery....

Many people have reported running a Toughbook for close to an hour after the Operating System or BIOS warned that the battery was dead.

 

No, that is not what calibration does...
I never said that the calibration data are stored inside the PC. On the opposite, they are stored inside the battery circuit.
When batteries age, you can consider as if they loose capacity. During charge and discharge, the internal circuit monitors voltage and current and calculates stored charge, remaining charge, etc. using battery known characteristics.
If batteries characteristics change during time, you need to update the internal calibration to allow a correct calculation.
So, what these calibration program do is, starting from fully charged battery, let them discharge and write those information inside the battery, so it will be able to tell correctly to the PC when it is going to be out of power.
Now, charge cycle will not change by this calibration, it will still be constant current, then constant voltage, then maintenance current. These values are fixed by the chemistry of the battery and they are set inside the charging circuit (in fact, you always start from a fully charged battery and then go down to zero, never the opposite). What changes is that, for example, for a new battery with a cell voltage of 3.2V capacity will be 100% of the nominal, while for a old battery it will be just 80%.

 

By the way, this is exactly what I would like to do... I guess that there is a misunderstanding about the word "recalibrate".
I do not want to recalibrate the battery, I want to recalibrate the reading of the battery.
If, for some reason, when the battery capacity is at 95% the BIOS thinks that it is not enough to switch on, I want to recalibrate that information, not the battery charge value.

 

In any case, I see that in Europe a new battery costs as much as half of what I paid my CF30... Any suggestion about a honest place where I could buy a new one?

 

Battery recalibratin on going... right now 1h30 has already passed and the indicator is at about 40% (that is 60% left)... so battery capacity is not so bad.
Let's see how long it takes to switch off...

 

Calibration done, more than 3h before switch off. The meter reached 100% at switch off...
Now it is charging. It seems to me that battery is ok.

 

Well in the good old USA I can get them for $30-$40 (eBay) used but 4+ hours but the post office will not ship a battery overseas.

 

Shawn,

You are correct. Panasonic states that all battery recalibration does is to charge/discharge/recharge your battery so that an accurate "Time Remaining" is displayed. If your batteries are not exercised regularly I feel it is also a good idea to do occasionally. Of course this was really an issue with the NiMH batteries... Not so much with Lithium Ion.

 

Rick,
Thanks. I never have found the official word on battery recalibration. Do you know what documents this is in?
Probably in every owners manual Panasonic ever published..Which shows how much I read owners manuals..


Why do I get pleasure in seeing it's a DELL in that photo? I could not find a photo of a Toughbook in that condition..:thumbsup:

 

Shawn... I believe it is in the "Important Tips" PDF that is stuck to the desktop when you load the OS via Recovery CD/DVD... Either that or in the User's Guide.

 

Reason....they don't use Sony batteries like everyone else did. . I remember getting a recall notice from Dell telling me to stop using my laptop or it might go boom

 

This has been always true for all batteries and all laptops, independently of the cell chemistry.
No calibration can change the full charge cell voltage, not for Li-Ion, not for NiCd, not for NiMh.

 

Not to pollute threads about CF-30s but this is pretty much the same. I am building a CF-74 for a friend. When I first booted it up and loaded W7... It was warning me that I should replace my battery. You can uncheck this box to make the warning go away. Also... The charger was at 99% for HOURS! After it turned green finally... I tried unplugging it and running the laptop on battery alone. I start getting warnings about needing to plug in the battery within 20 minutes.

So... I run the Brecal... It was almost at a full charge when I started it so it had to discharge it mainly before it charged it back up overnight.

Using it this morning with 50% brightness on battery for the past 30 minutes. I am not stressing the CPU but it shows another 4+ hours of battery time remaining. Vastly different reports than from last night.

Now... Maybe I could have kept running the laptop with the warnings for hours last night... Or it might tell me 4 hours now and be dead in 1... But it appears to have worked the way it is supposed to.

 

Yes, that is what I mean. And if there is some checking of the battery charge done also by the BIOS (just making an hypothesis), it is possible that the laptop is prevented from switch on by false readings.
On another laptop (also with Li-Ion) I had the opposite issue: the PC suddenly turn off when the battery was at 40-50%. No shut down, no hibernate... just off. That was because the OS thought that the battery was at 50-40%, while it was completely drained.
Right now I cannot check if the recalibration worked because I have to use the C30 every day, but as soon as I don't have any observation at night, I will leave it unplugged for some day and I will check it.

 

gpC.... Valid point. I think the batteries have a "planned obsolescence" also by time. You have to figure that the manufacturer of these want to err on the side of caution when dealing with Lithium Ion.

While I have never had a Toughbook shut down while reading 50% life left (after a recalibration)... I have had many in years past that would go from 50% life to zero in a matter of minutes... It would always warn me though.