Bought a 61Wh battery in late 2023 for my new AMD build and, unfortunately, it decided to swell up and die just a few months after the warranty ran out. Wasn’t showing any signs of diminished capacity or anything, just ballooned up slowly over the past couple months (hard to remember exactly when the touch pad started to subtly bow outward).
Anyway, no warranty means I gotta buy a replacement. Fine. And they’re currently out of stock. Two questions about that:
Anyone know when the bigger batteries will be back in stock?
Have there been any improvements to the battery since I bought the last one? I’m not a fan of buying and having to discard stuff that just barely outlives its warranty period, and maybe I’m just better off with the 55Wh pack which has, for me at least, been much more durable.
You might try reaching out to Support to see if the battery would be covered. The worst they can do is take up your time and say no, then you have to decide if you want to buy a 55 or wait for the 61 to come back in stock. Best of luck, hopefully things work out well.
Well, I’ve opened a ticket so we’ll see what they say. Thanks for encouraging me to reach out, I just assumed it’d be pointless even trying since it’d been more than a year.
Cheers!
Unrelated side note: I was looking at what it’d cost to just quickly replace the battery right now + get a backup, and being unable to order 2x the 55Wh because the store thinks they’ll have to come from different warehouses is silly.
The store has a hard time understanding that when one does want the products despite them being from different warehouses.
When the replacement batteries do get installed, consider limiting them to 80% charge so they are not always maxed on charge. It will extend the life of the cells in the long run. The newer BIOS releases has some logic to limit the charge state if plugged in for a long period of time.
Honestly, just leaving them at 80% should cover the majority of users that use them as a portable laptop without a major impact on battery life.
I set the limit up on my old laptop a long time ago after a firmware update added it. Sometimes it works and the battery stops charging at 90%, but sometimes it doesn’t and I just randomly find it at 100%. In any case, I thought that only protected against slow capacity degradation (which I wasn’t seeing any problems with), not the battery trying to pry my case apart and explode.
Also, what different warehouses? It’s just two of the same item instead of only one, lol. I’m only a bit annoyed by that since it’s an extra $20 shipping fee if I were to just place two separate orders.
The 61Wh battery is 40%(17% before 55Wh discount) more expensive than 55Wh, and it’s only has 11% more energy.
To make matters worse, as I recently discovered the 61Wh has artificial degradation after 100 cycles, lowering the voltage from 17.8V to 17.6V(55Wh’s Limited Charging Voltage), downgrading the 61Wh battery to 55Wh even if you maintain the battery by only charging to 75% to 80%.
You can’t make the claim that the 61 Whr battery has artificial degradation without proper evidence. You’ve only tested one unit (which is your own) and lack numbers to reproduce it. The only way to prove your claim would to have numerous samples that were gathered in an unbiased way. I can refute this as my 2 61 Whr batteries haven’t suffered significant degradation over time.
All rechargable batteries degrade over time. This is just the nature of how the chemistry works. Yes there will be some that are not manufactured to the same quality and that is to be expected.
Limiting the charge is a way to mitigate the battery from overexpanding especially when exposed to a colder climate.
Think of it like putting a bottle of water in the freezer that is 100% full. Water expands when it freezes this the bottle will either expand or crack because the fluid wins almost every time.
The capacity of a battery goes down with temperature. Though if it already had X electrons stored and the capacity goes down then where are they to go? (This is a crude analogy though the concept is still the same)
Ordering two of something from the store should not be generating an error even if it thinks they are coming from different warehouses. If that is the case then there is some work to do to fix an oversight on how the store might want to function to be more user friendly.
I understand the desire to get a fix and have a hot spare on hand. There is a good chance with the issues they have had with the 61Wh battery expanding they are going to warranty it anyway. I would get the 55Wh and if they replace the 61Wh due to warranty then the 55Wh can be your backup.
I genuinely wish someone would devise a case, even 3D printed, to have a 55 / 61Wh battery as a portable charger.
Chemistry degradation is different than battery manufacturer(in this case, ATL) deliberately put a timer to degrade the battery artificially overtime, the first one is unavoidable the second one is avoidable.
We already have that, it’s adjustable in BIOS
Could you please view the cycle count on HWINFO? I think the 17.8V to 17.6V downgrade occurs at around 100 to 140 cycles
I can see the appeal to believing there is a planned obsolescence from the battery manufacturer. However, I have a hard time believing this is the case from the standpoint of the charging and battery management is done through the charge controller which is independent of the battery itself.
The battery is somewhat inexpensive by comparison to other laptop vendors. Plus, it is literally designed to be repaired if it wears out or is defective.
If someone honestly believes their laptop battery is degraded they should start a case with support and let them determine if it should be replaced under warranty. Otherwise, it is a wear component similar to cell phone batteries. The big difference is its ease of replacement.
To be clear, my battery was not showing any signs of diminished charge capacity before it began aspiring to pry its way out of my case or set something on fire. That’s not why I started this thread. I have no complaints about charge cycles when it comes to either this battery or the one in my old laptop.
Thank you again for telling me about the extended warranty and encouraging me to reach out to support. I didn’t know about any of that and was just assuming I was simply out of luck having to buy a new one. It looks like I’m gonna get a replacement. In the meantime, I’m going to dig into why the charge limit feature seems flaky on my old laptop so that I can set everything up properly on my new one. I’d like to, as much as possible, minimize the risk of this all happening again in another year.
Still curious if there’s an actual issue with the battery packs themselves or I just got bit by a bad unit, though. I understand a battery degrading and losing capacity faster than it should if it’s not allowed to regularly discharge, but swelling up and being a hazard isn’t the same thing as “accelerated wear”.
I have to agree with this assessment. The electronic monitoring of battery charge/discharge is not an exact science, which is why it is necessary to periodically do a full discharge/charge of the battery to recalibrate the electronics. Quite frankly there is no advantage to a battery manufacturer or laptop manufacturer to “deliberately” degrade a battery. Quite frankly you are in cloud cuckoo land thinking this is being done, I suspect your usage pattern will have a much bigger effect on your battery capacity.
Hi,
There are bugs in the battery management code in the EC that cause battery life problems.
My advice would currently be to unplug the psu while on suspend or while powered off.
The current EC sends the battery through many small charge and discharge cycles completely unnecessarily, thus degrading battery life.
