Draining and Battery

[ronz1281993]

Does a cycle of Full Charge and Full Draining/Discharge increase Battery Wear? I just recently tried to Fully Drain my battery and now it shows a battery wear level of 4.3% from 2.3%.I usually charge my battery when it reaches 10%.My Battery is almost 2 years now. How do I possibly decrease my battery wear now?

[Chris]

I wrote a detailed answer to this yesterday but apparently forgot to hit post.

Basically, you can physically damage a battery by discharging it to 0% or even close to 0%. ALL chemical batteries wear out over time. Honestly, I'm really surprised to see your wear as low as it is for a 2 year old battery. I would expect to see something north of 40% for that age. My 3 year old 9 cell has about 75% wear.

You cannot "decrease" wear. Physically your battery can only hold so much power and that amount decreases over time. What you see in BatteryBar is the battery smart chip's estimation of how much capacity it can currently hold, compared to the original design capacity.

I would consider yourself lucky that your battery is holding up as well as it is.

[Zimaia]

(03-26-2012 12:17 PM)Chris Wrote:  I wrote a detailed answer to this yesterday but apparently forgot to hit post.

Basically, you can physically damage a battery by discharging it to 0% or even close to 0%. ALL chemical batteries wear out over time. Honestly, I'm really surprised to see your wear as low as it is for a 2 year old battery. I would expect to see something north of 40% for that age. My 3 year old 9 cell has about 75% wear.

You cannot "decrease" wear. Physically your battery can only hold so much power and that amount decreases over time. What you see in BatteryBar is the battery smart chip's estimation of how much capacity it can currently hold, compared to the original design capacity.

I would consider yourself lucky that your battery is holding up as well as it is.

Well Chris, i'm having problems with accuracy of battery wear. sometimes it says 0% and them 0,7% and next day 0% again.

So i really don't know waht is going on, my laptop have 4 mouths hold and i guess it should have some wear right now!!

This is really a strange behavior, pointing some wear and then no wear at all!!

[ronz1281993]

yes i really found this weird. When I started using battery bar it only showed a battery wear of 0.1% after installing, and my laptop was already over a year. The weird thing is, i don't know why it has a low battery wear, but the total hours reduced to an average of 6 hours from its 11 hour original capacity.

[Chris]

BatteryBar is reading the values as provided by the battery, so it's really the chip in the battery that's "acting weird" and not BatteryBar.

What I have noticed is that while Windows APIs support quite a bit of data collection from the batteries, Windows only displays percent remaining and time remaining to the user, so many manufacturers don't put the effort into making the other statistics really accurate. HP is notorious for not even including the (dis)charge rate.

I'm not sure what you tell you except the best thing to do is probably just to watch the "Full Runtime" value and that'll slowly drop as your battery starts lasting for shorter periods of time.

[Zimaia]

(03-27-2012 01:38 PM)Chris Wrote:  BatteryBar is reading the values as provided by the battery, so it's really the chip in the battery that's "acting weird" and not BatteryBar.

What I have noticed is that while Windows APIs support quite a bit of data collection from the batteries, Windows only displays percent remaining and time remaining to the user, so many manufacturers don't put the effort into making the other statistics really accurate. HP is notorious for not even including the (dis)charge rate.

I'm not sure what you tell you except the best thing to do is probably just to watch the "Full Runtime" value and that'll slowly drop as your battery starts lasting for shorter periods of time.

Thanks Appreciate your feedback