new battery at 25.9% wear?

[kronhead]

I am trying to decide if I should be unhappy with a new battery I bought - or if the numbers actually show I got what I paid for - or more.

Battery Bar says I am immediately at 25.9% wear after install and charging - which sounds bad. But that's out of 88,800 mWh. And it shows my capacity as 65,830 mWh (which is roughly 74.1%, or 100% minus 25.9%, of 88,800).

The specs on the battery I bought say 10.8 volt, 4400 Mah (which I assume is milli-amp hours). And 10.8 volts times 4400 Mah would be 47,520 mWh? Volts times amps = watts? So maybe I got MORE than I paid for? Or maybe I am comparing apples and oranges - different units than I think.

Anybody have an opinion on this? I suppose I also need to make sure that, when I shopped around, that I was comparing equal capacity batteries - not just looking for the cheapest one that fit my laptop ...

Its nice to have all this info - if I only understood it better!

Dan

[Chris]

Your math looks right. Is it an OEM battery or generic replacement? My guess is they didn't bother to update the "design" capacity level in the battery's smart chip. All the values reported by battery in the popup (except time remaining) are all just as reported by the battery. With non-OEM batteries those values should be taken with a grain of salt.

Your case, I would run through a full discharge cycle with BatteryBar running and then look at the battery profile (right-click and choose Battery Profile Graph). Then you can see how it discharges and how long it lasts.

[kronhead]

(12-14-2010 06:33 PM)Chris Wrote:  Your math looks right. Is it an OEM battery or generic replacement? My guess is they didn't bother to update the "design" capacity level in the battery's smart chip. All the values reported by battery in the popup (except time remaining) are all just as reported by the battery. With non-OEM batteries those values should be taken with a grain of salt.

Your case, I would run through a full discharge cycle with BatteryBar running and then look at the battery profile (right-click and choose Battery Profile Graph). Then you can see how it discharges and how long it lasts.

I think it's a generic. I'll run through a couple of cycles to get some accurate data.

I did have a problem - altho I didn't write down the exact sequence, and I confused myself with the #'s at one point - but I don't think BatteryBar knew it was a new battery when I put it in. It may have had the new battery wear and capacity - but the old specs (somewhat obviously - without new data at first) for Full Lifetime.

I think I switched batteries during a hibernate, not a power off, if that makes any difference. I did not see 2 different batteries in Battery profile - even after selecting Use Alt Method. I think I did a Reset Stored Battery Profiles then.

It's not a big deal - I don't plan to go back and forth on my batteries - I was just curious how quickly it should recognize a new battery. Anyway, if you want me to try anything to gather data, I would be glad to - but it is working fine now.

Dan

[Chris]

BatteryBar detects batteries based on their unique IDs are reported by the battery. If your previous battery and this one both had the same unique ID (ASUS, for example, always uses the same ID on their batteries for some reason), then it would think it was the same battery. You can, again, use the Battery Profile Graph function to see the battery IDs of the stored profiles.

[Guest]

I have a 2 month old DELL laptop... and the battery wear is already 28%. Shall i file a warranty replacement for battery or is it normal?

[Chris]

If it's a Dell-branded OEM battery, I would be a bit concerned. Have you had BatteryBar since your first bought the laptop and the battery wear was at 0%? If you just installed BatteryBar and don't know what the values were before, it's hard to determine exactly what happened before that. You may want to let BatteryBar run for a week or so and see if the battery wear changes again. If it were me, I'd think about asking for a replacement battery.

There are things you can do to substantially increase wear:
1. Regularly discharge your battery to near 0% (less than 10%)
2. Leave you battery at <10% for a long period of time

If you don't do either of the above, you may want to try to recalibrate the smart chip on your battery. You can do this by running your system until automatic shutdown, then rebooting and entering SETUP (F2 at the Dell screen). Leave it in setup until the battery completely dies on it's own. Leave off and recharge completely to 100%. Turn on and boot into Windows. The wear value should have dropped. However, in my experience, recalibrations are temporary fixed and the wear value will usually increase again in fairly short order.

For comparison, my laptop is 3 years old and has a wear of 75%. My secondary battery is about 1 year old and has a wear of 28%.

[bzl324]

i have 3 different batteries for 2 Samsung netbooks and each battery showed "wear" of about 10-20% even though they were all pretty much new and haven't really shown much more wear loss since then....and that's not just BatteryBar reporting these kind of figures, another battery program i have shows identical numbers across all 3 batteries, so the BatteryBar program is not the problem...

[Chris]

(01-26-2011 03:57 PM)bzl324 Wrote:  i have 3 different batteries for 2 Samsung netbooks and each battery showed "wear" of about 10-20% even though they were all pretty much new and haven't really shown much more wear loss since then....and that's not just BatteryBar reporting these kind of figures, another battery program i have shows identical numbers across all 3 batteries, so the BatteryBar program is not the problem...

You're right there. BatteryBar uses Windows APIs to read the battery status the same as any other battery program you could get. The primary difference with BatteryBar is just how it uses that data to calculate the time remaining and some other info depending on the battery.

Battery Wear is just what the battery reports to Windows. In fact, Windows 7 even uses the same battery wear value to show the "Consider replacing your battery" message.