At first I never thought it could be the battery, because I replaced it less than a year ago. Today I finally had the time to open the thing up to inspect, and the battery has definitely become quite spicy.
I kept my original battery, which was replaced because that battery itself had puffed up a little bit and didn’t last as long as before (it would hold up to ~80% of its designed capacity when it was replaced).
However the battery in my laptop does see regular usage (it goes down to ~30% 2 or 3 times every week). I don’t think the BIOS update mentioned in the first post has been released for my motherboard yet.
acpi -i says design capacity 3915 mAh, last full capacity 3581 mAh = 91%.
I do not have a battery charging limit set in the BIOS.
I do plan to request a warranty replacement, but I wonder if I should revert to the 55Wh battery, because if the battery lifetime extender works as described in that post, it wouldn’t even be triggered with my usage pattern. I would not set a battery charging limit, as I do run the battery all the way down on a semi-regular basis. However, as an incentive for the Framework Team to improve this feature, I will start using the battery charging limit if they make it available within the OS (e.g. /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/charge_stop_threshold) instead of setting it in BIOS.
If the battery swollen despite low wear(low % capacity loss). It may be useful to use mechanical restraints to physically prevent the battery from swelling.
Here’s an example of an RC hobbyist 11.1V lithium polymer battery.
Notice the thin layers on the top and bottom of the battery pack, they are metal plates to prevent the battery cells from swelling.
This might also explain that why cylindrical cells like 18650 and 21700 outlast pouch cells
Note: the above is a generic advice to battery manufacturers, DO NOT attempt DIY battery/cell structure as doing so might damage it further, causing injury.
Being as you have have had two of the batteries swell up on you; a safer bet would be to limit it to 85% all the time. Like you said you regularly take it down to ~30% which would translate to it going down to ~15%.
Leaving it at 85% gives the battery a better chance not to swell over a longer period of time. For the few times you need it charged to 100% you can still change it and take it up all the way.
The trend in the industry is realizing what has been known for decades about lithium ion batteries; it is better to not charge it to 100% and leave it at that charge level over a long period of time. This will extend the life of the battery substantially. Plus the added benefit of having some charge left over means when a laptop goes from a warm home to the cold trunk of a vehicle or backpack that extra charge has somewhere to go instead of nowhere to go.
Setting it to 85% on the 61Wh battery is better for it and is actually pretty close to the 55Wh battery capacity.
Thanks for that information! I do have a build of fw-ectool from 2022 and both commands you sent appear to work.
It would still be nice to have a more standardized interface to access it though. That said I don’t want to appear too pushy, especially considering the 11th gen model is almost 4 years old now…
Thanks. Learned something new for the day right there. It’s been pretty cold out there recently. I guess that might very well be the cause.
Re @pkunk: My 55Wh battery was in service for more than 2 years before it was replaced. It was swollen very slightly when I was doing the RTC substitute module mod, I could barely make out the outlines of the cells inside. But as a precaution I replaced it with the 61Wh battery. The situation for this new battery is pretty strange, as it basically happened over the past two weeks. I’ve never seen a working battery swell up so quickly before.
With all that additional background out of the way, I’m definitely setting a charging limit whenever I can after replacing the battery. As for the immediate action I would take, I guess I’m going to discharge the spicy pillow to some low percentage and take it out of the machine.
