“What Should I Do With A New Laptop Battery?” is one of the most common questions people ask when purchasing a new laptop or a new battery for their current one. That’s why we’ve put together a short but detailed guide on some tips and precautions to follow with a new battery.
No one likes having their laptops battery life deteriorate to around half its capacity within less than a year. So that’s why when you get a new battery/laptop your going to want to do everything possible to ensure you’re maximizing its lifespan.
Sadly battery technology hasn’t progressed as much as we would have hoped for. So it’s crucial that you follow a number of tips and precautions that will keep your battery healthy and for longer. These will mainly revolve around.
- Your charging habits
- The environment you use your laptop within
- Monitoring your battery health periodically
7 tips For Healthy & Long-Lasting (New) Laptop Battery
A Lot of people would have you believe that it’s okay to keep your laptop plugged in charging all the time, or that you don’t need to break in the battery when it’s new. We wish that were the case, but it simply isn’t.
This is the reason people need to often replace their laptop batteries when they aren’t even a year old yet. Then they wonder the same thing again when they purchase a new one, and that one follows the same premature patterns.
Breaking In a New Battery
Whenever you purchase a brand new laptop or a new battery it is often only charged to around 50% of its capacity. Rarely will you ever find one that comes fully charged out of the box?
Leave your laptop plugged in charging until the battery reaches a 100% charge. We recommend leaving it charging even after it reaches full capacity for a few hours. Try to avoid using your laptop during this period as well, if at all possible.
Once a few hours have passed you can remove the laptop from charging, and use it normally until the battery fully discharges and the laptop shuts off by itself due to a low battery warning.
Then you’re going to want to let it charge to 100% again. What this does is that it calibrates the battery. You can repeat this process 2-3 times if you want a perfect calibration, but once should also be enough.
Avoid high temperatures
Research conducted by Battery University has shown that high temperatures can have a pretty profound effect on your laptop, and not in a good way.
Their research showed that when your laptop battery is exposed to temperatures above 32C/89F for prolonged periods of time. It can actually damage your battery.
They stored a numerous number of ordinary lithium-ion batteries, the most common type of batteries for laptops in a range of temperatures for 3 months.
Results showed if you store your battery charged at 100% at a temperature of over 40C for 3 months. The maximum battery capacity will drop to just 65%.
So if you plan to be your using your new battery in high temperatures you should avoid it altogether if you want to escape from premature battery degradation.
To learn more about these tests and any information pertaining to batteries, just head on over to Battery University’s website.
Avoid Full Discharge
Whenever possible avoid letting your battery drain all the way to 0% whenever you can, it’s okay when you want to calibrate your battery. Though you should not try to not make it a regular thing.
If you let your laptop fully discharge for an extended period of time then it can cause permanent damage to the battery, and it might never be able to hold a charge again.
To put the definition of full discharge in more technical terms. It is when the battery runs out of power to the point where the chemical process in the battery cannot be fully reversed by charging, effectively rendering your laptop battery useless.
Avoid Charging Your Laptop Battery To 100%
A laptop battery is only rated for a certain number of charge cycles. It is a term used to describe the estimated lifespan of a battery. To define it in technical terms, it is “the process of charging a rechargeable battery and discharging it as required into a load”.
Most ordinary lithium-ion laptop batteries when charged to 100% regularly have an estimated 300-500 charge cycles lifespan. However if you don’t let your laptop charge above 80% of its maximum battery capacity, you can more than double the lifespan of your battery.
Tests conducted by battery university showcased that if you charged your battery to 80% the charge cycles rose to around 600-1000. If you go even lower to say 60% its around 2400-4000 charge cycles.
Though 80% is pretty much considered the sweet spot, as it can still give you a decent amount of battery life, and prolong its lifespan by over double.
Remove Your Battery When Storing It for a Prolonged Period.
If you happen to be storing your laptop for a prolonged period of time, let’s say longer than a week or two. Then we would recommend removing the battery from your laptop if at all possible.
Store the battery in a place where the temperatures do not exceed 30C either, and by that we don’t mean you go pop it in the freezer for 3 months. Just someplace where moisture and heat won’t be able to get to it.
Once you take it out of storage, charge the battery to 100% again before letting the laptop run solely on battery power.
Keep Your Software Updated
Try and keep Windows/Mac OS or whichever distribution of Linux you use, and your software updated. These updates often contain patches that can reduce the load on your battery.
Keeping your Operating System updated is the most important of all. If you’re experiencing irregular drain even on a new battery. It could be your outdated OS that’s causing the issue.
Monitor Your Battery Health Periodically
If you want to get a full detailed report about the behavior, charge levels and estimated battery capacity levels from recent discharges. Then you can easily generate a full report right from Windows itself. You won’t even need to download any third-party software.
Through these reports, you can get an idea of how your charging habits are affecting the performance and lifespan of your battery.
Step 1: Click on the Search Bar near the Windows Start Menu button
Step 2: Type in “CMD”
Step 3: Right Click on Command Prompt.
Step 4: Click on “Run as Administrator”
Step 5: You will be presented with a layout like this.
Step 6: Type in the command “powercfg /batteryreport”
Step 7: Once finished it should give you the URL of where the battery report is saved. Copy it from CMD.
Step 8: Open File Explorer and paste it in the file path section
Step 9: A new tab will open in your browser with the battery report.
Step 10: The section Installed Batteries will give you info on your original and current battery capacity.
Step 11: The section Recent Usage gives you power stats over the last 3 days.
Step 12: The section Battery Capacity history gives you information on how the capacity has decreased over time.
Step 13: The section Battery Life Estimates gives you an estimated battery life based on previous battery life drain recordings.
Conclusion
So after reading our short but detailed guide, you should be familiar with all the tips you need to follow, and all the habits you need to avoid to ensure your brand new laptop/battery remains healthy for a long time.
If you feel we left something out, be sure to leave that in a comment down below!.
How in the world are you not supposed to charge it above 80% while using it at home or in a hotel with it plugged in? Are you suggested we NEVER used the power cord unless it’s well below 80%? Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of using the wall charger?
Getting the battery report…all went well until I entered the URL into te file path. Then it said it couldn’t find the file. There is no file listed in windows as just system 32. Where do I search for this file? I have an older HP, from 2013.
Older laptops that use 18650s Lithium ion batteries in an array of (6):
For those laptops that still use 18650s, can you just simply crack open the battery “compartment”, take out the 18650s (cutting the tin) while attempting to find out which battery has a dead cell than simply replacing it?
I’ve been doing numerous projects that involve the use of 18650 batteries therefore I do have very good knowledge of how the batteries operate and do have the appropriate battery chargers that will give you details of each battery while having the option to also repair the battery by re-calibrating it for best possible voltage and Mah outcome.
Only problem is I don’t own any Punch Processing Welding Equipment therefore I would be stuck just free handing it with regular 20/80 lead solder and of course a heated soldering tool.
I just wanted to get your thoughts if it’s best to replace all 18650s inside the case or just find the dead cell battery(s) and replace that ones that are causing the problem and simply let the laptop charger handle the calibration or should I just take out all 6, charge them all to full (separately) while calibrating all of them in a seperate battery charger while of course adding in the new battery(s) that caused the array to fail in the first place.
Thank you.
So how far should you let it, the laptop battery, go down before you decide to charge it up to 80%. I think I heard you should never let it go past 20%
Apparently comments are not to be considered questions here (I have not seen any replies). Nonetheless, I’ll thrown my hat into the ring also…
My question, upon reading this article, was also… how can one only charge up to 80% (in order to increase the number of cycles/life of the battery)?
Is there some type of setting within windows in order to accomplish this, or might there be a software solution?
There’s no way I’m going to stress over the charge percentage (watching/waiting for the 80% point), heck – I’d never get anything else done if I was checking on that!
THANKS !