The original battery is undersized. Any motherboard should be able to hold cmos settings for 5 to 10 years without power.
The original Framework dies in as little as a week.
Even with power, the original battery dies and stops taking working at all after just 2-3 years, as we have all now started to discover the hard way.
Mine died and would lose it’s settings instantly when turned off, and no amount of charging time worked. The cell no longer took a charge. This is especially annoying when the motherboard is not in a laptop any more and no longer hooked up to the default video and keyboard. I need it to retain it’s settings.
There is no specific time that it must last without power, but a week or even a month is too little. There is no excuse for it not to last at least 5 years. That is not some entitled demand, that is the norm since the 80’s.
The problem is a combination of 3 things: using a rechargeable battery instead of non-rechargeable, using such a small one, and the motherbaord draws too much current while asleep.
We can’t do anything about the motherboard drawing too much current, and putting in the right kind of battery (a CR2032, which in this case would also require adding a diode to prevent charging) will still drain too fast because of the motherboard as well as the voltage drop across the diode.
The easiest thing we can do is just keep buying new ML1220’s every couple of years and keep the machine plugged in at all times so it never goes a month without power.
The next easiest thing is just install a larger capacity of the same type of battery that the charging circuit is designed for. (which is what I just did.)
http://community.frame.work/t/laptop-wont-power-on-unless-i-plug-in-ac-power/
http://community.frame.work/t/viability-of-an-ml-1220-rechargable-battery-for-rtc-cmos-11th-gen/
Framework themselves proposed this fix which I think is a bit ridiculous as a solution, but shows that they recognize it’s a problem, something they did wrong and need to come up with some kind of fix for:
http://community.frame.work/t/rework-instructions-for-11th-gen-mainboards-to-enable-powering-the-rtc-circuit-from-the-main-battery/