Has anyone else had a battery die (spicy pillow dead) in just two years?

[Charlie_6]

@Hunter_Perrin

So, the battery protection only kicks in if you’ve had it plugged in for more than a few days, and I just plugged it in like two days before, so it was still in the 100% charge window.

@Adrian_Joachim

Either way just warranty it and maybe use a fixed charge limit in the future if you mainly use the laptop plugged in.

I think we are getting closer to the cause of the battery issue. In addition to voltage that probably makes the 55Wh more durable than 61Wh. The main problem is very likely to be BMS calibration or programming issue.

Firstly, the charging temperature is too high, probably due to Celcius to Kelvin conversion error. The battery only stops charging at 55C but slows down to a crawl as early as 20C

@James3

In the EC source code:
./chromium/src/platform/ec/zephyr/dts/bindings/battery:
atl,framework55w.yaml ← The FW13 55W battery charge max = 55 C, discharge max = 70 C
atl,framework61w.yaml ← The FW13 61W battery charge max = 55 C, discharge max = 70 C
atl,framework85w.yaml ← The FW16 85W battery charge max = 55 C, discharge max = 70 C

The battery charge min = 0 C, discharge min = 0 C
This is where the EC uses the battery temp to limit what it does.
You can look in those files for more details of the limits.

@Charlie_6

I discovered the slow charging a few days earlier when I read that ByteBender mentioned the power draw is only 20W switched off when the computer was “quite cold” without mentioned the actual temperature. I then paid attention to this. Instead of using the laptop immediately I decided to charge it after being left in the living room for a while, so I found that this problem.

The problem is the battery charging is very slow in temperatures far from cold, about 15°C to 20°C. For reference, Earth’s surface temperature is 14.76 °C.

I tested multiple times, that if you subject the battery to 15°C to 20°C, you can get persistent slow charging up to 4.5~5 hours to full charge. More data is needed to make a conclusion.

It would be better for the battery health if the temperature window is moved from 20 - 55C to 10 - 45C.

Secondly, the battery charging termination current is way too low. Near the end of charging, the voltage is held constant while the current decreases. When the current is lower than a threshold, the current turns off and charging is finished.
Most laptop I have used charges from 99% to 100% in 5-10 minutes. Even for laptops that I haven’t used for months (higher BMS error that needs a full charge to calibrate), 30 minutes is the most from 99% to 100%.
In the Framework Laptop, charging from 99% to 100% may take 30 minutes to 2 hours even if the battery has been calibrated by charging to 100% yesterday, showing that the charge termination current is way too low. This is also a contributing factor to battery aging.

Now we find the culprit, the next step is for Framework stuff to relay the message to the battery manufacturer to adjust the BMS accordingly.