Battery Cycle Count Not Increasing

Framework Laptop 13
1

I wanted to see how fast a Framework laptop battery would degrade with usage, so I wrote a program to cycle the battery in my 11th gen Framework laptop from 80% to 20% over and over in a loop with the help of a wifi smart plug like this:

  1. With the smart plug off start 8 threads of a compute heavy workload to utilize all 4 cores(sha256).
  2. When the battery percentage reaches 20%:
    a. Stop the sha256 threads.
    b. Make an API call to the smart plug to turn on power to the laptop.
  3. When the Laptop charge reaches 80% make an API call to the smart plug to turn it off.
  4. Sleep 10 minutes to let the laptop cool off.
  5. Goto step 1.

When I started the program the cycle count reported by /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/cycle_count was 84. After roughly 13 iterations of 80%->20% the cycle_count is still 84. I turned the laptop off and then on again to see if it would change, but it didn’t. Before this cycle_count was increasing over time in a way that seemed to roughly match my usage. I’m on BIOS 3.17 / Fedora 37.

Anyone know what could have caused cycle_count to not increase?

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I haven’t played around with battery statistics much, but I have seen conversation in threads like this one that the battery wear statistics sometimes require a full discharge/recharge cycle (not just 20-80%) to update, so it may help to do a couple full cycles to see if your battery statistics update properly.

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I noticed my cycles were stuck and not increasing, as Azure suggested a deep discharge/charge cycle seemed to kick it back into action. Now even shallow cycles seem to be registered properly.

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Interesting. I discharged the battery from 100% to 10% last night before bed and let it charge back up to 100% overnight. This morning it was still showing 84 cycles.

Today I opened the laptop and unplugged the battery for a while(30-60ish minutes). After putting it back together and turning it on the charge cycles had jumped to 98.

For cycle_count maybe unplugging the battery has the same effect as draining it to zero.

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That is strange but it reminds me I had disconnected the main battery for a few days in the same sort of time frame as fixing the cycle count and also (I think) around the time the cycles stopped counting.

Is your issue completely fixed? I’m interested to try unplugging the main battery again and see if cycles get “stuck” again.

Edit: Cycles seem to update more consistently after a reboot.