Hey everyone,
pls send me a link if this question is already answered.
I use my Framework on a daily basis, but mostly at home. In regards of the battery I have two options:
Which option is better for the health of the battery? Are there other ways to mitigate battery wear?
The main thing that wears a battery out is discharge/recharge cycles. Letting it run down then charging it back up repeatedly will shorten it’s life considerably.
Another factor is how full you charge it. Charging to 100% causes more wear than charging to 80%.
I have my battery charge capped at 80% and I have it plugged into AC whenever I can.
The following probably applies to laptop batteries as well.
I have an app for my Android devices called AccuBattery. It monitors charge, battery voltage, charge/discharge rates, etc, and can use this to assess battery performance. It can sound an alarm at a certain recharging percentage to remind you to stop charging and recommends setting this to 80%. From the data it gathers, it derives an estimate of the wear caused by each recharge cycle.
Whenever I charge to 100%, it gives a wear value close to 1.0, for example:
42% to 100% = 0.93 wear
74% to 100% = 0.82 wear
51% to 100% = 0.92 wear
When I only charge to 80%, the wear values are much lower:
52% to 80% = 0.17 wear
49% to 80% = 0.18 wear
31% to 80% = 0.20 wear
I don’t trust those stats like 31 to 80 which is a 50% cycle at a high charge rate where the heat is the most…
and @Alpay welcome and read up via
how did you cap it? doesn’t that mean you always have 20% less battery than what you would normally have?
there’s an option in the bios to set a charge limit, and yes it does.
oh right, that. I guess I was wondering if there was an option that could be tweaked at runtime… I think I’d like the possibility of flipping that switch before I take the laptop out for travel, like charge it to 100% sometimes, but not always…
it can be done in the bios, there is somebody developing software to interact with the EC which may at some point be able to do what you’re wanting from inside the OS.
You can use fw-ectool in linux for this, eg:
sudo ectool fwchargelimit 80
For more info/discussion: Exploring the Embedded Controller
I’ve seen claimed that temperature also contributes to battery wear. I don’t know in what temperature range this becomes bad and how bad (obviously, once you get in the 200 C range the degradation is quite rapid, but then the flames will be an indicator).
Under a high computational load, the main board can heat up quite a bit; more so if airflow is restricted. This is accounted for in the design by keeping the battery away from the board, but heat will obviously diffuse through the whole machine.
I’ve noticed that fast charging (when the battery is very low) can heat up the body noticeably, the left palm rest area in particular. I don’t know if this is getting to temperature ranges that are a problem, but if you’re concerned that high charge rates may be damaging and you don’t care about the rate of charging, you can limit it without reaching for a lower wattage charger with
ectool chargecurrentlimit ... (in mA)
But the ectool is only a Linux option
Actually the battery is one of the few little gripes I have with my 11th Gen. Supplied by NVT (never heard of before), it was already at 96% capacity on the day I took it out of the box. Coming from 20+ years of Thinkpads which usually started out between 105 and 115% of their nominal capacity when I bought them, I felt a little let down there.
Even more so because I capped charging to 90% on the first day. But even though the battery was - apart from a dozen days of mobile use or so - hardly being used and did not have one single complete discharge yet, the battery capacity readout is now down to 42Wh, from a nominal 55Wh.
Bottom line: after about 9 months of very sparse use and despite the charging cap of 90%, my battery has now only 84% left of its nominal capacity.
I really like the Framework a lot and would buy it again. But IMHO the battery is one of the bits where I see quite a bit of room left for improvement.
#> ectool battery
Battery info:
OEM name: NVT
Model number: Framewo
Chemistry : LION
Serial number: 010D
Design capacity: 3572 mAh
Last full charge: 3011 mAh
Design output voltage 15400 mV
Cycle count 16
Present voltage 16616 mV
Present current 0 mA
Remaining capacity 2733 mAh
Flags 0x0b AC_PRESENT BATT_PRESENT CHARGING
@F_Behrens - first, a disclaimer. I am no expert on batteries, just a simple, dumb end user. Your wear number made me curious and as a side benefit got me to rebuild ectool, which I had when running Pop!_OS but hadn’t set up since switching to Manjaro after the update to 22.04 (I think?) went poorly. That’s not a knock on Pop!_OS, it’s polished and I was happy with it. I like to tinker and am having fun with Manjaro.
If I haven’t yet put you to sleep. the reason that I’m replying is that I was seeing my capacity slowly drop over time as well. I have my setup capped to 81% charge, but until that was available the machine often was charged up to 100% and left plugged in. I know that that’s not great for the battery, but so it goes. After reading some of @amoun’s posts I decided to set the system back to 100% cap, charge the machine fully, let it run down until it shut off, then charge it fully again. After that I set the cap back to 81%. After doing so my reported capacity went from somewhere in the mid to high 80% range to the low 90%. Particularly at your low cycle count I wonder what results you might see after going through those steps.
Here’s the output of ectool battery on my setup:
Battery info:
OEM name: NVT
Model number: Framewo
Chemistry : LION
Serial number: 012B
Design capacity: 3572 mAh
Last full charge: 3284 mAh
Design output voltage 15400 mV
Cycle count 303
Present voltage 16474 mV
Present current 0 mA
Remaining capacity 2688 mAh
Flags 0x0b AC_PRESENT BATT_PRESENT CHARGING