Battery Wear Increase VERY Fast

[cartucho]

Hi,
I am a BatteryBar user for almost 1 month now. And I noticed what my Battery Wear is growing VERY Fast.
The first time I run BatteryBar reported a Battery Wear of 31.1 (my machine is a Acer laptop bought in Nov '10) It seems to me as too much wear for a six month machine.
Today Battery Wear is 34.2.
I think with 3.1% in 25 days is too much wear.
Is this normal. My battery is bad?

[Chris]

It's really hard to say. If you have been consistently discharging your battery to less than 10%, that could be causing the wear to increase rapidly. Otherwise, it could just be part of the normal built-in calibration process. You can force a recalibration by running the battery down as low as possible and then booting into SETUP (BIOS) mode and running the battery until it's completely dead. At that point, plug in the A/C power and leave it off while charging up to 100%. That'll force the battery to re-evaluate the capacity the battery can hold.

PLEASE, only do this every few months. If you try to do this regularly you'll destroy the battery.

My advise for long battery life is to recharge at 30% remaining. You should only drop below 30% on rare occasions when you don't have access to A/C power.

[Sovereign]

It is possible that your battery is defective. However, the charging circuit may be out of its mind as well. I did several "deep" (down to less than 10%) cycles on flights to Boston from Chicago. Wear almost tripled from 5.5% to 14%. Yet, on the last discharge, the battery stubbornly clung to life at ~7%. After that, the wear reset to 5.5% again.

A battery worn down by 1/3 after six months suggests one of two things: user discharges battery deeply very frequently (which will destroy the battery, plain and simple) or the battery is bad. More information on your computing habits would help here.

[cartucho]

(05-25-2011 11:45 PM)Sovereign Wrote:  A battery worn down by 1/3 after six months suggests one of two things: user discharges battery deeply very frequently (which will destroy the battery, plain and simple) or the battery is bad. More information on your computing habits would help here.

I use the notebook mostly in the A/C but once a day I unplug it and use it with battery (but never discharge more to less of 20%).
Sometimes I move the machine from one room to another so I unplug it move to another room and plugged again.

However months ago I send the machine to the service (for a keyboard problem) fully charged and this guys have the machine for 3 months and dont resolve my problem so I when I recovered the machine,of course the battery was fully discharged. Could this have damaged the battery?

[Chris]

If it was discharged completely at 0% for a long period of time, it could certainly have damaged the battery.

[cartucho]

Well I did the calibration and even when in the first boot the battery wear don't change (38.8%) later (one use on battery until 40%) now the battery wear change to 26.8%

One weird thing what happen when I try to drain the battery to 0% is what BatteryBar and Windows itself show me 3 min left (in red) but my machine last almost 25 minutes more (playing a mkv 1080p x264) until power off.

Thanks Chris!

[Chris]

That's an indication that the calibration is off. Meaning the battery actually has a lot more than 3% actual capacity left, but the smart chip THINKS that there's less. Reboot into the BIOS or DELL diagnostics and run it until the battery dies completely, then do a full recharge while the computer is off.

NOTE: This procedure could damage your battery if you already have a weak cell in the battery.