My laptop wasn’t closing all the way and it turns out the battery was swollen. I took it out, not realizing the replacement battery wasn’t available. Aside from a USB-c battery, which isn’t ideal or convenient, is there an alternate battery that would fit and work? I’d accept a a certain amount of decreased capacity for portability. Thanks!
I would suggest contacting Support, as that does not seem like an expected scenario at this point in the life of the battery. Good luck!
I did contact support and they haven’t been too helpful. They ghosted me after I didn’t want to put the swollen battery back in the laptop to run tests, even though I said the battery still “works” in that it supplies power, but I don’t want that swollen battery in my laptop, or laptop bag.
Not sure why FW support would want you to plug it in for additional testing on your end. A swollen battery is a swollen battery, and that’s that. Photos should have been sufficient for warranty purpose, IMO.
Like, if they want the swollen battery to be tested, it should be tested in their fire-safe environment, not by the customer.
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Now this went terribly wrong, not that it might be dangerous to connect a swollen battery …
I wouldn’t even send it back (is this even allowed?), but they should send you a new one (if it’s not too old).
Definitely requires some special in-person handling, I would think. Not unattended shipping.
From Dell’s page, three interesting points:
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Discharge the battery before removing it from the system.
To discharge the battery, unplug the AC adapter from the system and operate the system only on battery power. When the system will no longer power on when the power button is pressed, the battery is fully discharged. -
Do not attempt to reassemble a damaged or swollen battery into a notebook PC.
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Swollen batteries should be returned to Dell in an approved shipping container (provided by Dell), to comply with transportation regulations or disposed at an approved recycling center.
So I guess, it’s shippable.
I’m going on 8-9 months with it, so fairly premature. I’m less bothered about the battery swelling up (stuff happens), but the somewhat unreasonable steps for troubleshooting (is that even the right word in this case?) is what bothers me. I thought framework was supposed to be a different kind of company, and having customer support jump through hoops for help and/or ghosting customers was a surprise to me.
I’m fine with going through troubleshooting steps for laptops that won’t boot, or have networking issues, etc. When it comes to the electrical components, though, I feel uncomfortable dealing with potentially dangerous things like swollen batteries, fires, and toxic chemicals spewing.
Edit: That’s why I turned to the forums. I was hoping maybe someone had an idea/lead for a 3rd-party replacement
Edit2: Oops, looked at the wrong order. I’ve had the laptop (and battery) for about a year (~11-12 months)
Framework has an internal battery stock for warranty purpose, no need to turn to 3rd-party.
Let me find the link to that statement.
FW support have most definitely got this wrong. Swollen batteries are potentially dangerous.
@AnonymousBovine - at this point I think that you should request that your case be escalated to the next level of Support.
…and maybe also have them to revise the swollen battery handling procedure / support script.
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@AnonymousBovine Please PM me with your order number and I’ll take a look. We should never recommend continuing to use a swollen battery and I need more context to find out what’s happened here. I’ll follow-up here with a transparent assessment of what happened once I’ve investigated.
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For future reference you are going about this wrong. Your laptop is still under warranty. The battery is malfunctioning and should not be swilling already. Show support your issue and tell them that. They should understand and send you a new battery. They will instruct you how to dispose of the battery or send it back for testing.
Even if you were out of warranty, if you have not used your battery enough for it to swell, they should still replace it.
I don’t understand. What should I have done differently? I did contact support, showed them pictures of the swollen battery, and told them I wanted it replaced. Framework support then asked me to plug a bad battery back into my laptop and do some testing. I told him I didn’t feel comfortable doing that, and that’s when they started ghosting me
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Base on what you mentioned and the way I understand it, you did the right thing. Maybe Joshua just didn’t get the sequence of events.
…and that you only started asking about 3rd party battery because you were hitting a semi-brick wall with FW support.
Hello everyone,
I’ve performed a full review of the ticket and can provide some context. There was an agent miss in communication as we could have provided better messaging which I’m going address as @AnonymousBovine absolutely provided images in their first conversation with us on October 3rd and our agent responded 5 hours after submission (as they weren’t on shift yet when it was submitted) asking for images again. The agent provided a troubleshooting step to have the customer try to turn on the laptop (with the battery removed) and obtain the LED blink code from the side of the laptop as they reported it would not turn on without the battery installed. This would have provided us a diagnostic code.
"Hi [redacted],
Thanks for contacting support, we’re sorry you’re having problems with your Framework Laptop but no worries, we’re here to help. Can you provide photos of the battery showing the swelling and a video trying to turn the laptop on emphasizing the side LEDs for us to investigate?
Looking forward to hearing back from you."
At no time did the agent specifically ask @AnonymousBovine to reconnect the disconnected swollen battery to perform these actions.
We received a new ticket from @AnonymousBovine today, October 20th (17 days later) reporting the same issue as we never received a response to our response to them on October 3rd. I assure everyone no ghosting occurred here as they have acknowledged seeing our response to their original inquiry in this thread.
We’ve only sent one unanswered response thus far and will be following up as our team is not on shift yet and this new response only came in this morning. While slightly outside of the warranty period, we will replace this battery and have @AnonymousBovine dispose of the original battery in an ecologically-friendly and safe way.
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Yes, the issue has been apparently resolved as FW messaged me saying they will send a replacement battery. It’s resolved to my satisfaction, at least. For reasons unknown, they never received several of my messages (spam filter?, incompatibility with gmail?).
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