How's everyone's [55Wh] battery health and wear looking?

[Adrian_Joachim]

@anon81945988

The discharge rate is always the same, browsing and the odd video which takes around 5 to 6 hours.

Discharge is done with the same use, until auto power on. Then I wait an hour or tow and power on and may get another half an hour use. It power off I leave it for another hour and power on and may get 15 mins. Usually it will not power on a four time.

Yeah that probably explains the variance, you using windows or something else?

I’d bet it doesn’t discharge all the way down but just a little further each time which would explain your initial downward trend.

Framework really should implement the online re-calibrate routine in the ec to eliminate that (hell it’s open source I might take a crack at that if they don’t).

@anon81945988

I can also measure the amount of watts used to charge externally

That’ll just give you even messier data, the dc-dc efficiency changes a lot more than the charging efficiency does. You could use a slow charger to reduce the charging efficiency differences even more if you want to do that.

@anon81945988

So the issue is how representative of the battery charge is the coulomb count ??

Good enough I suppose since that is how it has been done for ages now but it is certainly not perfect not that perfect really is required.

@anon81945988

Framework state 1000 cycles for 20% wear, or 50cycles for 1%.

Since the wear curves are usually not linear idk if you can extrapolate like that, they also afaik didn’t define what a cycle means and your battery may actually have more than 55Wh (even factory new cells have varying capacities) from factory which would hide the actual wear rate for a bit.

With the 18650s the roule of thumb was about double the cycles for every 0.05v less max voltage (of course you loose capacity initially but you’ll keep it longer), so if a 4.2v max cell is rated for 80% capacity after 300 4.2->2.5v cycles it would get 80% capacity after 600 4.15-2.5 cycles and 1200 4.1-2.5 cycles and so on. Given that there usually wasn’t all that much capacity at the higher voltages this tends to be a good tradeoff.

I have not seen too much data on the spicy 4.40 or 4.45 chemistry the framework battery uses but I’d bet it has similar wear characteristics so your only charging to 4v per cell should increase your longevity dramatically, assuming you aren’t grilling the battery cause temperature causes wear too independently.

Anyway, point is you should be careful drawing conclusions from data that is more noise than signal, humans are made to see patterns so we often tend to see them where they aren’t or misinterpret stuff.

Would be neat to get a datasheet for the cells in the framework batteries but I doubt that’s going to happen.

[Adrian_Joachim]

@anon81945988

If the reading of coulomb count is fairly accurate then I can compare what the capacity is relative to when it was received, that gives me an idea of wear

Just don’t read too much into a couple percent swings and you should be good.

[Adrian_Joachim]

@anon81945988

It could have gone either way but it dropped from 4.1 to 2.8

So much for not reading too much into a couple percent, especially without a full discharge and charge cycle.

Running plugged in (especially with a charge limit) leads to drift in the coulomb counter over time, that plus maybe a bit of battery self discharge would lead the battery to estimate it’s capacity a bit higher on a partial charge. That wear level is an educated guess of the battery and with it never reaching one of the extremes it tends to drift more and more from educated towards guess over time.

Look at it this way, it’s like you are measuring the distance between work and home by counting steps, that can be quite accurate as long as you reach home or work from time to time and start counting from there. If you just move a couple steps forwards and backwards over and over again, it turns less accurate.

[Alex_K1]

Hi everyone!

Hoping to get some help here.

Running an 1135G7 that I got in March 2022.
Using HWinfo64, my battery shows 10.2% wear after only 138 cycles.

I’m not really happy about this to be honest, as the claims by Framework that the battery is designed to retain 80% capacity after 1000 cycles seems to be a bit misleading. I’m not anywhere close to halfway there!

I’m not really using this laptop for heavy tasks. Light gaming while pugged in, but on battery it’s for document writing, web browsing, and watching videos. I don’t really use it off power that much.

So yeah, hoping to get some input. I’m not ready to be thinking about upgrading the battery, it’s still practically brand new!

[Adrian_Joachim]

@Alex_K1

Using HWinfo64, my battery shows 10.2% wear after only 138 cycles.

Have you done a full 0 to 100% charge cycle lately?

[Adrian_Joachim]

@anon81945988

Just to note a full discharge isn’t really possible as there are safety issues, the OS/BMS won’t allow such.

The point where the bms taps out is the defined 0% point, the os on the other hand is another issue.

Framework really should implement the lenovo style online recalibration mode, would make this a lot less confusing.

[Alex_K1]

Appreciate the help!

I just did a 100% to 0% and charged back to 100%.
I’m showing 10.4% wear after 140 cycles now. Seems like it’s pretty consistent here.

On the FW marketplace, the 55Wh battery has a “typical capacity” of 56.6 Wh, and a Rated Capacity of 55Wh. So that would make sense that the battery comes with wear from the factory, but this is sort of a manufacturer guarantee that it at least should contain 55Wh. If a new battery has less out of the gate, then the manufacturing standard is not upheld (but feel free to correct me ).

I think where this is coming from (for me as a consumer), if I read “designed to have 80% capacity after 1000 cycles”, then the message or meaning that I get is “This battery degrades slowly” or “this battery has a long lifespan”. And when I see that I have 89.6% capacity after 140 cycles…that leaves me scratching my head as to whether there is an issue.

[Wolf_Trabeitt]

Great to see that you are still continuing this Amoun.

As for me, the use case of my Framework has greatly changed from a work machine used on battery 5-7 hours a day to being plugged in and used nearly 24/7, aside from during my drive to and from work. Battery wear doesn’t worry me nearly as much as it did when I got it in Sept '21 and used it in a classroom without an outlet near the board. Now I have a new campus that has outlets everywhere. 1.75 years later, I’m at around 13% wear, which is the same as my last posting here in Nov '22, but never use it off the charger more than a few hours at a time since then, and haven’t seen it under 50% charge in … well, recent history.

I’d love to add to the data, but I don’t have the foresight or consistency to check that you do. I also feel like anything short of 15% wear is getting overly pedantic for most people’s use case, anyway. When the battery has more than 20% wear, I’ll get worried. It looks like we’re getting more than a couple years use out of the lithium batteries, and that batteries of a higher capacity are now in the pipeline. I think I’m very happy with how things have turned out overall.

Watching your exercise in battery monitoring has been great over the last year. Just thought I’d throw a couple more cents at this.

• Wolf

[anarcat]

I must admit I haven’t read the whole thread here, but I was about to create a topic on this and figured it was better to join the flock than shout on my own soapbox…

Anyway. I found my fork of the battery-stats program to which I contributed a script that will generate a nice graph of the life of your battery, provided that you already have the collector writing to the CSV file once in a while.

Here’s my rendering of the battery right now, after slightly less than a year of use:

The red line is the evolution of the battery health. According to the current levels, it’s at 3286000 out of 3572000 design capacity, which is 91.99%. You can clearly see “drops” in that line where the battery was somewhat “damaged” in one shot, which is, I think, the most interesting part of that graph.

I wish I could remember what happened mid-april or mid-may there! Those are two 5% drops that are basically the reason why the battery is ~10% used. I actually keep a life journal here (on paper, believe it or not), and didn’t not anything particular on those days, for what that’s worth. There’s a somewhat deep discharge before the may event (<10%) but nothing unusual, there’s plenty of complete discharge cycles out there that didn’t affect the battery that much.

This is the current tlp-stat output:

--- TLP 1.5.0 --------------------------------------------

+++ Battery Care
Plugin: generic
Supported features: none available

+++ Battery Status: BAT1
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/manufacturer                   = NVT
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/model_name                     = Framewo
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/cycle_count                    =    151
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full_design             =   3572 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full                    =   3286 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =    648 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/current_now                    =   2600 [mA]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/status                         = Charging

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_start_threshold = (not available) 
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_end_threshold   = (not available) 

Charge                                                      =   19.7 [%]
Capacity                                                    =   92.0 [%]

Interestingly, I haven’t used the laptop as my daily driver until about March 2023. Before that, I used it to do extensive tests so it spent almost half of its life being the subject to my torture, but none of that time actually caused problems to the battery. If anything, my normal daily use is more of a problem.

If I would venture a guess, my bad habit is to take the laptop from work, slap the lid down (so it suspends, presumably), shove it in a bag and forget about it. It happened a few times that I opened the lid after a few days and realized I forgot to plug it in, and the battery drained out on suspend.

I really wish Linux had some built-in (hello systemd?) way of waking up from suspend to do an emergency shutdown when the power is low. Surely there’s something that can be triggered somewhere to enable this instead of catastrophically failing the way it is now…

Anyway, that’s my data! happy to share the actual CSV file with Framework staff if that’s useful. Data is logged every minute or so.

[Adrian_Joachim]

@anarcat

You can clearly see “drops” in that line where the battery was somewhat “damaged” in one shot, which is, I think, the most interesting part of that graph.

Those are likely not when the damage happened but when the damage is noticed, which do seem to coincide with some of the closer to full discharges.

They way the battery measures its capacity is imperfect and will drift a little over time (imagine walking 10 steps forwards then 10 steps back with your eyes closed over and over, you’d probably drift a bit too XD), you might want to give it a full discharge (like as full as you can, basically until the battery taps out not the os) followed by a full charge to see how it actually looks.

[anarcat]

@anon81945988

Yes similar thoughts: and like wise an increase after 6 months ??

That could be when I started keeping the laptop mostly plugged in at work.

@anon81945988

Thanks for providing your data: Can you show the cycle count too ?

This?

@anarcat

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/cycle_count = 151

I read one hundred and fifty one (151) cycles… is that good or bad?

[anarcat]

@Adrian_Joachim

you might want to give it a full discharge (like as full as you can, basically until the battery taps out not the os) followed by a full charge to see how it actually looks.

Interesting. I have done basically this recently, and now the full size went down:

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full_design             =   3572 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full                    =   3279 [mAh]

[Adrian_Joachim]

@anarcat

Interesting. I have done basically this recently, and now the full size went down:

Full discharge then charge is the only way the battery can find out it’s actual capacity so it may naively look like full discharges directly damage the battery when it is actually only when it notices the damage.

@anon81945988

According to specs 100 should equate to a 2% drop (variables) so 3% in your cycle case. (20% in 1000 cycles)

Did they claim a linear decline in capacity? Battery wear tends to not be linear.

[Valence]

I got my 12th gen 13 in December `22.

My tlp-stat output is as follows:

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/cycle_count                    =    196
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full_design         =   3572 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full                      =   3219 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                    =   2873 [mAh]
Capacity                                                                           =   90.1 [%]

I’m a bit disappointed in the degradation which has been quicker then I’ve experienced with other devices

[Ted_Hart-Davis]

Hi! I got curious about others’ experiences and views on the topic of battery degradation, and found this thread.
I haven’t read it all. I’m on Windows 10, and don’t have the full stats because I managed to lose everything in July 2022 to BitLocker, which was enabled without my consent or knowledge, when I initially installed.

Anyway, this is a Batch 9 1135G7 with 32GB of Crucial DDR4-3200 and a 2TB ADATA SX8200 Pro.
I’ve run this laptop hard, and before I started hibernating it instead of sleeping it, it would often drain itself hot in my bag because of the Windows sleep bug, whatever it is. I’ve done multiple charge cycles per day fairly often, and when on battery it’s typically drawing 20-30w: I’m doing intensive things or have too much open.

I’ve primarily been using a 120w Spigen USB-C charger for most of a year for charging (100W PD contract), and often used it at full tilt while charging it, so maximal battery heat – though I live in the UK, so it’s not the hottest.

HWINFO64’s estimate shows me around 17% degradation:

Here’s a graph of the historical data available to me from that report.

I’m not surprised or disappointed, particularly: I’ve run this battery hard without a charge limit. Once this battery is spent, I will probably be at the point of wanting to upgrade to 13th Gen or to a Ryzen board, and I can probably then upgrade to a 61wh battery.

[Second_Coming]

@anon81945988

Just to say that the battery does not have any improvement, there are many arguments that calibration ca extend the ‘life’ of the battery.

Calibration was never meant for battery life improvement (if that’s what you were looking to say), it’s meant to provide improved reading of the actual capacity of the battery. i.e. “to get an accurate reading” in the quoted message.

[Ghostrider]

1 year and 5 months in, I’m down to 87.6% of original capacity. Large drop happened after about 8 months of usage and the battery stayed around that mark since.

[gaben]

Can we do Y-axis starting at 0 for these charts?

[Second_Coming]

@gaben

Can we do Y-axis starting at 0 for these charts?

In the case of capacity, I think starting from 100% is fine. Alternatively, see it as 0% wear at 100% capacity. (i.e. 100% is the starting point expected for new battery OOTB).

[Chris_Xiong]

5.1% wear at 36 cycles on my 4th batch 11th gen Intel. However the battery pack is slightly swollen. My battery hasn’t seen a lot of use until the end of 2022. I’m considering to replace it with the new 61Wh pack when it’s back in stock.