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

Community Support
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21

Thanks!

Re: the fan

It’s apparently not dead. Putting my ear up to the vent, I can hear it spinning up. It just doesn’t hit jet engine loud speeds like it used to when it would get as hot as it feels now.

We’ll find out whether I have the same issue as the OP where putting in a new battery brings the fan back to normal (I guess we’ll call this case the chicken before egg and where the fan may have killed the battery = egg before chicken).

22

You can install fw-ectool to diagnose the fan. Use sudo ectool temps all to read the temperature and the percentages after them the highest percentage is your fan’s PWM duty cycle. Then use sudo ectool pwmgetfanrpm to acquire the fan’s actual speed in r/min, it should be around 6500-7000 at max. If the duty cycle is high but the fan speed is low, the fan is likely broken

If you never touched the cooling system, replacing the thermal paste to PTM7950 is recommended

23

Thanks, great idea! I haven’t gotten around to building fw-ectool (I’m not on Fedora but CachyOS). Might as well do it now.

UPDATE:

I tried building the firmware, and it basically requires that I do so on a Chromebook OS due to missing prerequisites.

Presumably whoever built fw-ectool for Fedora figured out how to get all the prerequisites together in Fedora and then built and packaged it.

This is beyond my skill right now…

BUT, good news in that Framework Support asked me to send a bunch of photos of the bulging battery and determined that yes, it is worthy of replacement. It is bending the input cover up enough that the display bezel does not touch the left and right front corners of the input cover with the lid closed, but when I take out the bulging battery, the display bezel rests flat across the full width of the input cover’s front edge.

24

UPDATE:

Just unplugging and re-plugging the BAD battery (as part of proving to tech support that it is bulging–they asked me to take it out and take photos of it) fixed the fan behavior (I hear and feel it spin up to full speed occasionally, blasting hot air out the bottom of the laptop).

I installed the new replacement battery that they sent me under warranty and it made no difference to the fan behavior that had been fixed a few days prior by unplugging and replugging the bad battery.

The laptop still gets warmer than I would like but now that I know the fan is kicking in properly I am not worried.