Battery Charging queries

t remain confused over a specific issue ---- is the battery damaged by leaving it connected after full charge, and / or by running it down to near zero? Addvice given by well informed authors of articles contradict one another, in particular regarding 'over charging'. Some say with modern batteries and hardware the battery is not harmed and anyway charging is now turned off automatically, whereas others say harm is likely; some suggest keeping the battery between 50% and 80% is advisable. Who is more likely to be right, or is the answer 'neither'? And why?

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This is especially important to users of most hybrid 2-in-1 Tablet PCs (and tablets generally?) because most have sealed cases and soldered in batteries, making it very difficult (though not impossible) to replace the battery. My experience (in the UK) is that hardware repair businesses are likely to say it is not worthwhile, just chuck the computer away and buy a new one. Somewhat drastic, especially if like mine the machine, an AllDo Cube 10.1, has been good for 4 years so far.

When (not if) my battery starts to fail, will it as temporary measure, work using an external battery bank? Out of curiosity I have recharged my PC this way, which worked. However, that is not the same as running the computer from the bank, plus it did run down the power bank quite rapidly.

If it is good advice to keep a laptop battery around 80% does this also apply to smart phones, and to battery power banks?

Battery issues relate to two factors Heat and Manufacturers

With heat if any battery was left to operate in 60+ C for a prolonged time span you risk losing huge part of their capacity even if they were new , to remedy this you might need one of those cooling pads where there are fans located and dedicated for the batteries .

As for Manufacturers part do note that the majority of the manufacturers are not fair in that game , it had been known for a while now where batteries are hard to replace in phones and laptops where changing them might actually half damage the device for the sole purpose of forcing you to upgrade so they sustain their business cycle , if they give you immortal devices or ones that are easily maintained they might collapse same way Nokia did .

Here are few hints that some manufacturers do and yet some don't to preserve life of batteries , so while Del and Lenovo try to distant the battery from CPU and GPU just to keep it away from heat sources HP has the habit of sticking the battery right beside these to sustain the maximum heat possible .

There are some manufacturers that tweak their battery controllers to just report 0% charge while they are actually at 5% charge just to save the battery from 0% drainage such as Lenovo Thinkpad and Asus .

Over charging is sometimes proofed in some laptops by disconnecting the battery when it reach 100 % and operating on DC current while some manufacturers play a dirty game of making the battery provide the current all the time while charging rendering the battery flickering by plus and minus charge which shortens its life significantly in around 8 months to one year .

A good trend to preserve a battery life , sometimes called conservative mode is for those devices with batteries to be kept charged at 50% and yet disconnected and the entire power is provided by DC yet however only IBM & Lenovo & Asus adopt this trend through their power managing software while other manufacturers advice you just remove the battery if removeable at 50% charge and continue working using DC while if not removeable all you get is manufacturer assurance that they do smart things to preserve battery life you need not to worry about and yet they really don't .

Devices marked as business machines usually get better quality batteries than those are not , I have had some IBM Thinkpads maintaining their capacity for well over 5 years while an IBM Z series lost its capacity in well under a year of similar use and environment .

So what is the bottom line ? the factors left in our hands to preserve a battery are minimal , you are just guaranteed a year of sustained performance then its all about luck and manufacturers kindness afterwords .

It appears that everywhere you look, you see another method to preserve or manage your batteries, and that would be the same for opinions on how to charge or manage your battery's life.

I have decided to conduct a personal study on battery charge practices for Li type batteries used in several different applications including laptops. This isn't a detailed scientific study and I do not have the resources to study different charging practices on similar or the same devices.

After having read endless articles on Li charging practices such as;

How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries - Battery University

I have set-up my laptop on a switched power bar and run an app called Battery Limiter with setpoints at 45% and 90% to use as a monitor or guide.

Battery limiter - Download

I have reset the advanced power options on my PC to the following see attachment;

The bottom line is deep discharging is one of the worst enemies next to excessive heat, avoid them if at all possible. I believe that keeping your laptop plugged-in without power cycling of any sort will eventually decrease the battery's capacity significantly. When I worked, my laptop was usually plugged-in and the battery standby time became quite limited when I had to go offsite without a power source.

I also have Li batteries in dive lights (168 Wh) and underwater scooters (940Wh+). I have replaced dive light batteries often over the years, not too expensive from batteryspace.com but I would hope to never replace a scooter battery. With the dive-related Li batteries, I practice similar behaviours but try to balance between reducing charge cycles and avoiding deep discharge.

That's just one more opinion on battery management. I hope this adds some clarity to your quest.

lol @W10 Tweaker

so basically we solve losing battery capacity (which is actually the main indicator of a battery life) by using only 60% of battery's capacity which is actually losing capacity ?

nIGHTmAYOR said:

lol @W10 Tweaker

so basically we solve losing battery capacity (which is actually the main indicator of a battery life) by using only 60% of battery's capacity which is actually losing capacity ?

Yup! That's about the size of it and it may or may not prove beneficial, depending on the application. Sitting in my living room and reaching to one side to flick the power-bar switch on or off is no biggy to me. I want this battery to last for years.

When I worked, it was much less of a big deal. If the battery could not last long enough, the company would have to buy a new one. Again, no biggy to me.

W10 Tweaker said:

Yup! That's about the size of it and it may or may not prove beneficial, depending on the application. Sitting in my living room and reaching to one side to flick the power-bar switch on or off is no biggy to me. I want this battery to last for years.

When I worked, it was much less of a big deal. If the battery could not last long enough, the company would have to buy a new one. Again, no biggy to me.

I get your point but this isn't quite a solution , its rather a massive sacrifice for the greater good since you are already living with a short capacity battery since day one , that is one thing , the other is , you never know if your battery is a good quality one , sometimes certain batteries' chemistry deteriorate by time based on the quality they put into it , this is quite known to Vaping market where they prefer AWT batteries for example over LG ones .

nIGHTmAYOR said:

I get your point but this isn't quite a solution , its rather a massive sacrifice

LOL, ya that leaning left to flick the switch about 18" away is a big sacrifice. And my battery may or may-not last a couple of years longer, who knows.

nIGHTmAYOR said:

you never know if your battery is a good quality one , sometimes certain batteries' chemistry deteriorate by time based on the quality they put into it

The only true test of my laptops internal battery would be to extract it and put it on an analyzer, anything else is just smoke and mirrors, but you probably know that.