I have a new Acer Aspire E5-576G laptop. I use it every day 3-7 hours, all on battery. I am amazed at the battery life.
Ok, so at the end of the day, I plug it in overnight.
Some nights the battery is still at say 70% when I plug it in.
Am I better off letting it discharge for another day, say to 25% before plugging it in?
In other words, is there an optimum charging strategy to maximize/preserve battery life?
Mel
Hard to believe you can have used it for up to 7 hours and still have 70% battery capacity left at the end of the day. Running for three hours and maybe.
Yes, I'd be curious to see what happened with another days use and to see just what sort of life you get. In normal use I wouldn't regularly take it below around 40% charge but an odd full discharge won't do any harm.
Mel,
There is no known optimum charging strategy. Battery technology has evolved so quickly that nobody has really been able to keep up with it.
I have been monitoring battery capacity for some time on a few computers.
- Keeping them 100% charged whenever I can does not seem to have any adverse effect on its useful life [some people say it shortens battery life but I have not found this].
- Leaving a battery fully discharged for quite some time is thought to shorten its useful life.
You do realise that the "100%" / "25%" etc displayed by Windows is not the whole story?
- Batteries wear out. Your computer manual might well give an estimated useful life as being, just for example, 300 full discharge/recharge cycles. Batteries from third parties rarely give this data.
- I believe that your typical 30% daily usage only counts for 30% of one of the 300 full discharge/recharge cycles but I cannot prove that and battery makers don't publish such data either.
To find out how much life has been used up, run either of these commands in an Admin command window
- It does not matter which command you use.
- One of my computers [a quite old one] can only run the Energy report successfully but others can do both.
[substitute a folder path of your own for my D:\Desktop]
Battery report
powercfg /batteryreport /output D:\Desktop\BatteryReport.html /Duration 1
Energy report
PowerCfg -energy -duration 0 -output D:\Desktop\EnergyReport.html
You can look through the results to find the Design Capacity and Last Full Charge entries [both figures are in mWHrs]. The comparison between them tells you how far through the [example, 300] full discharge/recharge cycles you are. For one of my batteries, this is the current result
so this battery still can still achieve 37970/55997 = 68% of its original storage capacity.
- In other words, it can power my computer for 68% of the period of time that it could do when it was brand new.
- In other words it is only 32% of the way through its estimated life of 300 discharge/recharge cycles.
- This 68% result will continue to reduce the more I use it.
- The average rate of loss of capacity has been 7% a year during the period when I have been more or less keeping the battery 100% charged the whole time.
- The average rate of loss of capacity was previously 19% a year during the period when I used battery power for several hours every day.
- On another computer, one that has been on AC power continuously, the average rate of loss of capacity has been 1% a year
- When I have AC power connected, Windows shows it as 100% charged but that just means 100% of whatever it is currently capable of.
I hope I have not confused you. If the whole subject is new to you then I probably have so do post back if you have any questions [I think I have included everything useful in this post].
Denis
Last edited by Try3; 09 Aug 2019 at 09:34.
Thanks for the responses. Mooly, I think I was not clear. The 70% refers to my shorter days (say 3 hours). I do get about 9-10 hours on a complete charge (from 100% to plug in right now). If you research the E5-576G Acer Aspire laptop, you will find that a strong positive feature is its very good battery life. It actually outlasts my Chromebook and rivals my wife's iPad. One negative is that it is internal and it is very tricky to replace (Acer recommends servicing it when the battery is shot, as I guess there are some fragile connections involved). Denis, I think the life-cycle is about 300 charge/recharges.
Denis, in your example, are you sure it doesn't mean that you have USED 68% of your available full cycles?
Again, thanks for the replies. If I understand you correctly Denis, I can charge it as I've been doing; there is no preferable way.
Mel
It can currently store 37970mWh
It could originally store [was designed to store] 55997mWh
37970/55997 = 68% remaining
Yes, you can carry on doing it as you have been.
Denis
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