I’ve been noticing disappointingly short battery life on my Framework laptop 13, with a Core i5-1240P. I’ve been using this laptop for over a year, previously with no charge limit set in the BIOS, but I set a charge limit of 90% a few months back.
I downloaded hwinfo64 to check the status of my battery, and the wear level looks really high for how many cycles the battery has on it. From what I understand, the battery is supposed to retain about 80% capacity after 1,000 cycles, but my battery’s current state is under 74% capacity at just over 190 cycles. Here’s a picture from hwinfo:
Is this something that can happen sometimes? What (if anything) am I able to do to help my laptop battery life? I haven’t been able to find any information or topics about Framework batteries online that have this issue.
Yes, I have used it almost daily for doing work, before and after setting the limit in the BIOS, after each day it discharges to around 10-15% and I recharge it to 90%.
The coulomb counter can drift quite a bit if it never hits the rails, your application case of drifting a couple % forwards and backwards but never hitting the rails is pretty much the worst case for getting accurate capacity readings.
Basically your battery has no idea what the capacity is at this point.
I bet if you do a full discharge (like full full not just until windows chickens out) followed by a full charge to 100% your “wear” will look a lot different.
I really think they should implement a battery re-calibration process like the thinkpads have, would make this kinds of issues a lot easier.
So essentially I should do a discharge from 100% down to 0%, recharge, and check the reading again?
Is that going to help its lifespan because the laptop’s battery management will know how much capacity it actually has?
I don’t think so. It would give you a more accurate reading, though.
The measurements you get are estimates anyway. The thing you probably actually care about is how long you can use your laptop on a single battery charge. Or perhaps you don’t, since in practice you recharge it way before it’s anywhere close to empty.
That’s the issue for me, my laptop has a hard time making it through the day. It lasts about 3.5 hours in total which is less than I need it for some days, so by the time I get home it sometimes is basically running on fumes. It just seems like it is worn out much more than Framework states it should be.
In that case it may be worth a shot since it looks like what it thinks 90% is drifted down quite a bit.
If you just fully discharge it after a “running on fumes” incident and then fully charge to 100% untill it stops charging you won’t put a lot of additional wear on the battery compared to a regular use cycle.
Usually I have just my web browser open. I’ve got Windows Defender in the background, maybe 2-4 tabs, I’m just doing web browsing and using Google Docs most of the time.
Occasionally, I have bluetooth enabled to use earbuds but I usually leave it off, and it’s almost always on for under an hour if ever
Since you are actually using the laptop on battery, don’t set a charging limit. That is really for people that are leaving it plugged in 24/7, because sitting at 100% for long periods of time is bad for the battery. Use it, wear it out, and replace it.
And since you were seeing such low reported capacity, I would go ahead and discharge, charge, and check again (after removing the charge limit). Contact support if it’s still under 80%.
If your battery is going bad, the 12th gen beta BIOS supports the larger replacement battery, which may be worth the upgrade anyway: 12th Gen Intel Core BIOS 3.08 Beta Release
Although I get more than 3.5 hours from my 11th gen doing music production work, so you might also have some background app or expansion card or configuration problem causing power drain.
