I should probably add,
Really new, and perhaps better quality laptops /may/ have better charge
circuits, that won't try and charge a 95% charged battery again, thus
saving it from the early death suffered from leaving the battery in a
wall powered laptop.
Generally speaking you should expect ~30% battery capacity loss after a
year, and ~50% or more after 2 years in a battery that has been looked
after but still used, better quality cells will fair better than this.
On 24/01/15 01:44, Jake Anderson wrote:
over discharging will cause damage
over charging will also cause damage (but less so)
If the laptop is going to sit on your desk plugged into power for 90%
of its life, run the battery down a bit (like to 50% charge), then
turn the laptop off and take the battery out (assuming you want it to
last when you go on the road), Once every few months, charge it up,
run it down to about 20%, charge it again, then run it back down to
50% and take it out. Leaving the thing on charge all the time will
generally kill it.
The more you discharge the battery the less lifespan it will have, so
if you can charge it at 50% all the time (assuming you are a regular
user of said battery) it'll last longer than if you discharge it to
flat every time. I reckon with modern batteries 30% charge is probably
a good cutoff point in terms of cycle life vs calendar life.
Every once in a while running it down to flat or nearly so then
charging again isn't a bad thing, it'll slightly increase the capacity
(this is a real effect, we see it on unpackaged lipoly cells we use in
robots, its not the memory effect, its something else, but a cell
thats been sitting for a while or only lightly used will gain ~30%
capacity with some "exercise") and more importantly let the fancy
chips in the battery re-calibrate their calculation of the capacity of
the battery.
generally discharging or charging cause damage, but the damage gets
worse the further from the middle you go, when they want a really long
life from cells, they run them just around the middle range, like from
40% charge to 80% charge, with consumer lithium cells you will
generally hit calendar life issues before cycle life if you don't go
nuts.
btw the memory effect is a specific thing for nicad cells that was
discovered when the batteries were discharged to *exactly* the same
point over and over again (say 20% state of charge), then when
expected to discharge past that point they had practically no
remaining capacity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect#True_memory_effect
On 23/01/15 18:15, William Bennett wrote:
Menno,
Thanks for the information.
I will add this: you'd be surprised how many computer experts,
professionals included,
labouring under this misapprehension.
I asked around because I had been told of the existence of “memory”, but
felt that the
manufacturers should know what they were talking about.
William.
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 4:42 PM, William Bennett <[email protected]>
wrote:
So, having absorbed, from my friends, the dangers of partially
recharging a lithium-ion battery due to “memory”, I read the insert
that
came with the new laptop battery: –
“Recharging a partially charged lithium-ion does not cause harm because
there is no memory. Short battery life is mainly caused by heat
rather than
charge/discharge patterns.”
Um, who's right?
William Bennett,
Armidale.
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