damn this went from 1 reported case to 3 reported cases of swolen 61wh batteries within a couple days
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This comment thread is almost, but perhaps not quite to the level of victim blaming.
I thought somewhat about battery management after I had my laptop for a little while and I came to the conclusion that being able to limit charge is a nice feature and many people will appreciate it, but ultimately I would prefer my laptop to be at 100% charge on the chance that at some point I will need it and I won’t have prior warning of when that might be.
Indeed, this has happened at work when I’ve taken my laptop to a meeting room and that meeting has overrun long enough that I’m into the second meeting with no break.
Keeping your battery at 100% and your laptop powered / charging for 99.9% of its time is not something that should be a concern when we are discussing battery failure. It’s absolutely good advice to not do this if you want to “take it easy” on your battery because you want the battery to have a longer overall useful working life.
The reason I decided 100% / charging 99.9% of the time is fine for me is because it’s a Framework laptop. The battery is easily and cheaply replaceable. There are obvious environmental concerns, but I’m comfortable with my choice.
EDIT: What I’m inexpertly trying to say here is “let’s not scare OP by suggesting that 100% charging is going to expose them to the risk of catastrophic battery failure”, because these batteries are designed to cope with this.
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It’s not meant as blaming.
He asked what he could do to prevent it in the future.
While nothing can guarantee it won’t happen, a certain number of batteries are always going to have an issue, not holding the battery at 100% day after day can reduce the risk. It’s a fact of life of current li-ion technology that you must choose, increased stress / wear (leading to reduction of capacity) or limit stress by limiting time held at 100%.
Luckily, Framework makes batteries as easy as possible to replace & without price gouging. So whatever one chooses, it’s fine.
And while puffed up cells are a problem, and brings concern, it’s not a catastrophic battery failure. Packs can be surprisingly resilient. I’ve had cell phones that break themselves open from puffed up cells. Severely bending the circuit board and breaking the case in multiple places. Yet the cells resisted puncture.
Well ‘puffing’ may not in itself be catastrophic I would say it is a worry. Luckily it seems the input panel will distort and give notification, maybe an internal sensor would be usefull or more like - important.
The issue is that is some situations 100% charging may be unwise. In your case where the 100% is going to be used it is as designed. In my use case it would not be wise.
So it’s not just about warring and definitely not blaming anyone for cause and effect but notifying anyone who may read this that 100% charging is fine but what you do with the laptop and battery after that may result in damage and how worrying that is, is for the individual.
I have no intention of implying blame but clarifying the user’s responsibility. Once in the hands of the user it’s not equally ‘right’ to blame the manufacturer but similarly they have a responsibilty via contract . . . business wise . . . warranty … use case.
What’s the third case?
That’s me, this post is two, what’s 3
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Then I guess I counted you twice XD
Two in two days is not quite as bad, still not great.
Battery may still work fine but if it doesn’t fit in the laptop anymore that isn’t worth much.
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Can we please stop treating a bloated battery like it’s nbd? As someone who’s punctured a battery in my living room (bent a phone battery during replacement), I think it’s a little more serious than that. They’re fire hazards to everything around, and burn hazards to your hands which are resting on top of it. Not to mention strongly poisonous. I have not charged my laptop above 60% (I’ve only charged it at all because I need it for school), and I have the front two input cover screws unscrewed to alleviate all pressure.
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I agree with @Be_Far, bloated battery ( also called “spicy pillow”) is not something normal and is a fault of the battery, either by user fault or a manufacture defect.
Remember Galaxy Note 7… battery with defects with no room to “bloat”
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For the function of the battery it mostly isn’t (as long as it doesn’t get out of hand but in your pictures the adhesive was still holding it mostly down so there isn’t all that much pressure), for functioning in a device it is because it physically won’t fit and and could get punctured by internal geometry.
The puffing is kind of a downside of pouch cells, cylindrical and prismatics have a venting valve so you don’t notice when they vent but with pouches even the slightest gas production is noticeable. On the other hand it’s an incentive for the manufacturers to make the cells more perfect XD
Non puffed batteries are just as bad if not worse when you puncture them, mechanical damage is a different issue. The state of charge also makes a huge difference about how energetic the event will be if you puncture them, if they are fully discharged to close to 0v like a laptop bms tends to do when it goes int’ safety shutdown they are pretty close to inert.
This may just be pure bad luck or a bad sample, I bought 5 loose pouch cells for a project once (that I of course never actually did as usual) and left them just sitting around, years later one of them was puffed the others were fine, all still at pretty much the same voltage and no charge cycles. That’s just one anecdote on that, the puffing is imo likely not your fault.
That would be totally a non-standard use of a USB-A port.
I’d be surprised if it worked at all. Amazed if it worked well.
I think he means carging from a usb-a source, so 5v. The intel frameworks can do that, the amds physically can too but refuse to due to a ec bug, you can trick it into doing it though.
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Ah. Of course.
Okay so line 1 of my reply was a silly misunderstanding on my part.
Line 2 still more or less applies, but you appear to know more about it than me.
Kinda, it should work but is broken on the amd frameworks, works fine on the intel ones and would work fine on amd if the ec code for that gets fixed.
But that’s pretty off topic here
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Yes. But it’s much easier for a puffed bat to puncture. Especially if screwed into a laptop with nowhere to expand.
I’m honestly not even comfortable with my own level of safety on this thing right now, I’m only using it out of necessity. A puffed battery is more dangerous than a non puffed battery.
That’s the important bit
Say someone kicks my laptop bag. Non puffed battery? Nothing happens, maybe the lid corners bend like is common on the framework. But a puffed battery and it bursts and starts a fire. It’s the incidentals which make it dangerous.
You may be arguing with the wrong guy here, I never said you should leave it in the laptop.
Puffed battery doesn’t work in a laptop cause it doesn’t fit anymore, if you force it to fit you introduce mechanical damage which is very bad with lithium batteries.
Precisely.
A puffed up battery is one quite small step away from a catastrophic and dangerous failure mode.
It’s already failed and the fact that it’s puffed up and not burst into flames means that the absolute last line of defence is the thin outer membrane containing the pressure.
Let’s not forget there are already a number of safety measures that have failed in order to get to this point, none of which were the fault or cause of the person operating the laptop (unless they are literally smashing it with hammers or trying to fold it into quarters).
Laptop batteries, as I’m certain every single OEM is aware, will quite often be used in a device that rarely leaves a docking station or is away from being charged. 100% charge on a modern Li-Ion is not 100%, just the same as 0% is not literally 0%. There are margins for safety in both directions. There is over-charge protection, short-circuit protection, over-temp protection, over-current protection, physical protections in terms of space around the battery and robust construction that resists puncture and other damage.
Batteries that turn into “spicy pillows” are faulty and dangerous and should be treated with utmost caution - removed from any inside area as a first step.