New Laptop battery - best way to prolong life

[Deleted User]

I bought myself a replacement laptop battery and am wondering the best way to prolong its life

Should I leave it to drop to 10% charge remaining before charging it and unpliug it when it is fully charged or do modern Li Ion batteries not bother too much ?

Peter999_2

I personally keep the laptop charged between 20% and 80% and it seems to work well for me.    Lithium Ion batteries seem to work best when they are kept between those two percentages.

[Deleted User]

Deleted_User said:

I bought myself a replacement laptop battery and am wondering the best way to prolong its life

Should I leave it to drop to 10% charge remaining before charging it and unpliug it when it is fully charged or do modern Li Ion batteries not bother too much ?

Some laptops such as Dell have charging profiles that maximise longevity of the battery depending on your usage profile so have a look at that.

Lithium ion batteries prefer being at 40%-80% charge for longest lifespan but if you need to use it for extensive periods on battery then you will need to charge to 100% and run down lower than 40% so it isn't always practical to keep it in the 40-80% zone.

Keeping a battery at 100% charge for long periods also shortens the life, so if you are mostly plugged into AC then stop it from charging at 80-90% whilst running on AC power and only top off when you need to use the battery. Check your laptop BIOS / support applications for options on how to do this including time schedules for charging and the percent charge state for those time windows.

Running down to 20% or less shortens the life as well so avoid where possible.

Lot's of small top up charges are less stressful to Li-Ion batteries than emptying and full charging again.

Also fast charging shortens the lifespan, if your laptop has the option, use the slower or standard charge rate unless you are in need of a quick charge.

Unfortunately the advice for older Ni-Cad / Ni-Mh batteries lingers on and many people think that running to empty and giving a full charge still applies to Li-Ion but it doesn't so avoid that except maybe once a year to re-calibrate the battery storage capacity.

[Deleted User]

Should I unplug the charger as soon as the battery is fully charged or does the extra being pumped in to it reduce its life ?

[Deleted User]

Deleted_User said:

Should I unplug the charger as soon as the battery is fully charged or does the extra being pumped in to it reduce its life ?

When it is fully charged, the laptop charging circuitry will stop pumping any further charge into the battery so there is no need to unplug.

knightstyle

Have a look..... https://www.apple.com/uk/batteries/maximizing-performance/

Biggus_Dickus

 @Deleted_User

A lithium-ion  batteries’ ability to hold its charge starts to deteriorate from the moment it’s manufactured, whether it’s in constant use or it’s just sat on a warehouse shelf. If you buy a replacement battery it may well be newly manufactured,...or it could be a number of years old,...you’ll probably never know.

Some say that keeping the battery fully charged is a killer,...other maintain it’s discharging and charging that decides when the batteries ultimate demise will occur.

I’ve had new laptops where the first battery has gone tits up after 2-years, but a cheapo replacement from Amazon has lasted significantly longer than the original,...same type of usage and no difference in the charging regimes.

The ‘internet’ advice on how to prolong a laptop battery’s ‘birth to death’ lifespan can be very meritorious, but sometimes it’s confused and conflicting;...I gave up worrying about it years ago, tbh.  

 

 

 

 

[Deleted User]

Biggus_Dickus said:

 @Deleted_User

Some say that keeping the battery fully charged is a killer,...other maintain it’s discharging and charging that decides when the batteries ultimate demise will occur.

.....

The ‘internet’ advice on how to prolong a laptop battery’s ‘birth to death’ lifespan can be very meritorious, but sometimes it’s confused and conflicting;...I gave up worrying about it years ago, tbh.  

  

There are some trustworthy and factual sources of information about prolonging battery life...

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries

...it is a bit of a long read so I summed up the conclusions in my earlier post.

[Deleted User]

How do I increase the accuracy of the "time remaining" meter - it shows 5 hrs 35 mins from fully charged - yet an hour later, it shows 2 hrs 15 mins ?

I have not let iit go below 25% which shows as 1hr 40 mins yet - but no way will it last beyond another hour

Will it "learn" the increased size of the new battery and automatically calibrate itself after a few charges ?

[Deleted User]

Deleted_User said:

How do I increase the accuracy of the "time remaining" meter - it shows 5 hrs 35 mins from fully charged - yet an hour later, it shows 2 hrs 15 mins ?

I have not let iit go below 25% which shows as 1hr 40 mins yet - but no way will it last beyond another hour

Will it "learn" the increased size of the new battery and automatically calibrate itself after a few charges ?

The time remaining is an estimate and will vary from minute to minute depending on how much power the laptop is drawing from the battery so will never be 100% accurate and can vary dramatically.

The power consumption varies depending on what you are doing - it is not a constant.

If you check it when you are doing nothing much and the screen is dim it might say 4 hours remaining. Then 2 minutes later when you've turned the screen up to full brightness and hammering the processor / disk doing something intensive it could say drop to 2 hours remaining - it always estimates remaining time based on the current power consumption.

Unless you have got a really old laptop, the battery itself will contain the calibration chip which tells the laptop how much charge is left in the battery. This can be recalibrated but isn't the problem that you are experiencing as you said the battery is new so it should be fairly accurate and usually isn't necessary.

To calibrate the battery, run it down to as low as it will go before Windows forces a shutdown (usually 10%). Then boot the laptop and go straight into the firmware / BIOS settings and leave it on that until the remaining 10% is used up and the computer shuts down.

Then put it on charge and allow it to charge to 100% without interrupting the charging process and that will fully re-calibrate the chip in the battery as to how much charge the battery can hold.

Carrot007

[Deleted User] said:

Deleted_User said:

Should I unplug the charger as soon as the battery is fully charged or does the extra being pumped in to it reduce its life ?

When it is fully charged, the laptop charging circuitry will stop pumping any further charge into the battery so there is no need to unplug.

Or unplug if you want the battery to live longer than 6 months maybe? As said 40-80. However manylaptops only provide good performance on power. You can always remove the battery if possible (yeah it's not these days much, or at least no easily).

At my owkr they replaced all the desktops with laptops for ease of use. After 6 months the laptops that were all on power all the time had batteries that lasted 20 mins if you were lucky.

Of course you may have repsonded in a is is safe rather than will it do the battery harm. Well my OH has a top end (£2500+, bad at gaming but fairly high end workstation, anyway...) dell. Trackpad stopped working right. Engineer comes out. Out you leave it plugged in all the time and the trackpad stopped working due to battery buldge. Please at least unplug while not in use. So there is that as well.