Battery degradation

Yes the One year American brand ??

Still If you read those links, especially mine, the last one, you will see the detail that a) It wasn’t as designed so knock 2 % off and you have 9% in a year and that’s about expected

b) do a rundown and full charge as I have done twice and in my case the wear decreased each time, though it took a few days to show.

Thanks, I will take a look at the links. It would be nice if they were able to get a battery with higher density, however on the upside it only takes 3 minutes to pop in a new battery. Sure beats my old Surface Pro 4 for repairability. LOL

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I miss 5 seconds for a battery swap.

This is one of the handful of Intel 11th gen laptops still with modular battery:
FZ-55 MK2

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I have a Framework AMD Ryzen 5. The laptop arrived on Dec 2023, which is less than 3 month old at this point, and the battery is already at 96.7%. Is this normal behavior? Because if the battery continues with this trajectory, it will be below 65% in 3 years.

I have tried my best to conserve the battery: the charge limit is set to 85%, and I typically stop charging when the charge reaches upper 70%. Is there anything more I can do?

I highly recommend you check this thread for more details. Not only do the batteries arrive with slightly less than 100% wear from the factory, but you also need to do a full discharge and recharge cycle to calibrate the battery before you can have an accurate read on your battery wear percentage.

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Following from @Azure: If you see my post above that links to my data for the first two years you will see I frequently ‘calibrate’ the battery software and it makes quite a difference.

Notably as of Dec 23 and the complicit upheaval co-incident with this unchristian wear I failed to take daily records and things have changed.

If I get back to monitoring on I will update, but briefly :

  • I charge to around 78% and it is nearly always plugged in

  • One a month I do a full discharge to auto power off, wait a few hours and use the remaining 5% then charge to 100% and keep it that way for a day at least.

  • My cycle count is less than 90 after nearly two years, with a marked increase of 10 lately :slight_smile:

  • I used the laptop for about 6 hours over the first 18 months and less since last summer (4 to 5)

  • As I type this the wear is 5.8% which is high given the predictions I have from my own data

  • at nearly 6% for less than 100 cycles equates to 60% for a 1000 cycles and the specs say 20% for 1000

Don’t forget time decays the capacity, so the % wear will exponentially increase with just time and there is no indication how the 1000 cycles for 20% was achieved.

All the best

EDIT

A few things about a new battery incorporated in a working laptop
The battery may, as mentioned, not be 100% due to:

  • Manufacturing tolerances, so maybe only 99% capacity
  • Testing the laptop especially if with OS that has to be preliminary checked, to the degree that Windows may be setup and then the account wiped, using a cycle or so of battery maybe, if not run from mains
  • Checking all works from battery and not mains
  • I have also read that some batteries can take as many as 20 to 30 cycles to get the chemistry optimised.

Given the above I have a starting battery wear of 3.1% that went down to 2.9 after a month of quite a few cycles.

Only after that, some year of the above mentioned regime, did I get a reading of 1.9% wear

So the readings are all a bit down to perspective.

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Coming from the RC Airplanes/Drones world, I had a participated in the effort to identify good batteries, and how to handle them.
Some of the results are kept here (for my own usage: RC Batteries: Status).
What we figured out can be resumed in the following points:

  1. The highest resistance of a cell in a battery pack will determine the overall battery yeld.
  2. The temperature at which a battery is charge and stored will determine if it will deteriorate fast or not.

To 1: The weakest cell will be detected by the charging electronics, and the charger will charge the pack according to the specs of that cell. Also, if the resistance is high, it will cause more heat depending on the moved current. Remember that we (RC World) use the batteries with 60C to 90C - means, if we pull 90Amps at 16V out of the battery. With these currents, it happens that a battery just starts to burn inside the plane/drone. In laptops however, I doubt this will happen as the involved currents are way lower, but it can and did actually happen. You get the point.

To 2: The storage charge and temperature has always been an issue. The battery cell depending on the internal resistance, that internal resistance depends largely on temperature. The higher the temp, the higher the internal resistance. On top of that, the electrolytes can only hold a specific charge at a specific temperature temperature (all linked to the internal resistance too). If you charge a pack at 20⁰C temperature, then go outside where there is 0⁰C temperature, you will destroy your battery very fast. Because at 0⁰C, the battery cannot hold the same charge as at 20⁰C. That is also the reason the battery packs starts to grow in volume and look deformed.

These elements may not be visible immediately on low power consumption devices (as laptops etc.), but with RC Airplanes and 6S 90C battery packs, the effects can be visible after the 3rd day flying at 0⁰C. But the chemistry that happens in the RC batteries happens also in the laptop batteries.

In the end, never fully charge a device’s battery when you intend to take it outside in very cold temperatures. Especially if you leave it in the care and leave for lunch.
Best is to really charge the battery to 85%, then go outside.
For storage, we tend to store all at 3.8V for LiPo batteries. At that temp, the battery is able to handle most temperatures.

Yes and as such different battery chemistries are use in LiBs, as a high discharge rate, which is required for a UAV is not for a phone, but for a laptop that may drain 3A from a 16V battery, it is a query. I wonder what the framework battery chemistry is?

You have to remember that even when sitting idle, lithium batteries do wear out. It’s not like “keeping a battery at 50% for ten years, (like for instance plugged to a maintenance circuit)”, will keep it anything but new.

The degradation is also non-linear. I have 33% wear on a 10-year pack from Thinkpad.

Wouldn’t hurt to know, although likely going to be a trade secret. However knowing where they sourced the cells could be helpful.

Do we know if there is a way to stop the battery from charging right away?

For example if I set threshold to 80% and run a cpu intensive task, even with the 65w power adapter installed I see the battery fluctuate between discharging and charging. i.e. 79% for a second, then 80% charged, then 79% a few seconds later for a second, etc.

Would this negatively affect battery over long term? (My 65 watt framework adapter is going through steamdeck dock. I will try direct connection to see if same behavior…)

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Turning down the short-term boost power should reduce that behavior by quite a bit, then again going tiny charge and discharge cycles around 80% should not put a lot of wear on the battery.

The more power it has available the less likely it’ll dip into the battery for short peaks. Not sure if the steamdeck dock reduces the power available or just darws a lot of it itself but it is possible.

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I have the same behavior, I’m using Ubuntu 22.04.3 with recommended settings, AMD 13 ryzen 5.
Are you using Linux too? I wonder if people using Windows have the same problem.
I have still to investigate if it is possible to set another threshold before start charging the battery, like 60%, maybe with powertools: I had the max 80% in the BIOS has you, I would like that when plugged doesn’t charge until it reach 60%, really hoping that the power is taken directly from the adapter without pass through the battery and I’m not sure about it with this laptop…

I think the problem is the trend of over-utilization of battery capacity on laptop computers, Framework is no exception.
My 7 y/o old laptop has a 10.8V 3834mAh 41.40 Wh battery with the charging limit voltage of 12.3V. The battery consists of 6 Samsung ICR18650-22F with a rated capacity of 2200mAh and a charging limit voltage of 4.2V. As you can see, 4.2VX3>12.3V and 2200mAhX2>3834mAh. It’s clear that the laptop manufacturers under-utilize their battery pack for a longer cycle life. My recent laptop has a 7.2V 43Wh 5900mAh battery pack the 4 battery cells are arranged in a 2S2P manner. The actual capacity of the cells are about 3150~3200 each(I can’t open the battery pack without breaking it so no exact make and model of the cells). The charging limit voltage is 4.2V/cell instead of the previous 4.1V/cell. As time goes on, manufactures are leaning towards longer single-charge usage time over longevity.
Where are we now? Battery packs with 3.87V/cell? 4.4V or even 4.5V charging limit voltage? This trend makes limiting charging percentage of 80%(or even lower) a must if you want the longevity to be as the same as the battery pack in a 7 y/o laptop.

Hey! sorry for late reply… Just saw this.

I am on Fedora 39 yes. I have not tried to set a second charge threshold, but yes, on a different Lenovo laptop in our house that’s how it’s done. It has 80% max charge, and 60% min battery before it charges back to 80%. So if I use a lower wattage power adapter and stress the Lenovo I can get the battery to slowly go down, but it doesn’t charge right away, which I like.

I fired up windows just to confirm the same weirdness is going on and it looks like it does.

  • hwinfo graphs
  • cinebench r23 load
  • Framework charger plugged directly into laptop
  • Framework 13 AMD 7840u
  • Bios 3.05 (happened same with 3.03)

Look at the red box in charge rate graph. As soon as it’s 35w power package, it starts charging/discharging. And this I can see on my Fedora install as my battery icon switches from charging to discharging constantly under full system load.

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