Laptop Battery Care

If you own a laptop, you may have noticed that the battery life tends to degrade over time. A laptop that starts off with four hours of battery life may end up with only three at the end of the year.  As time passes, the battery becomes nearly unusable, holding a mere fraction of its original charge.

Battery degradation is an unavoidable result of battery use.  Although a great battery can last for many years, even the best cared for battery will eventually lose its ability to hold a charge. Proper laptop battery care however, has a huge impact on how long your battery lasts.

1.     Disconnect Your Battery When Plugged In

The batteries in laptops are sensitive to heat.  Excessively high temperatures will cause a battery to age more quickly than normal. Laptops themselves are often quite warm, particularly when they’re plugged into a wall socket and given the chance to use all of their processing power. If your battery is fully charged, it will be gaining no benefit from being plugged in while you’re connected to a wall socket.

In addition, it’s hard to be quite sure how your laptop is charging your battery when it is at 100%. Ideally the battery should not be sent any more current; however, there’s no way of knowing if the battery is being left on its own or is being sent a battery-life-killing trickle charge.

2.     Store Your Battery Properly

Surprisingly, laptop battery care doesn’t just mean keeping an eye on it while it is in your laptop. If you remove your laptop’s battery to preserve it during a period of extended desktop use, or your merely need to store your laptop and/or battery because you do not need it for some time, you need to pay attention to how your store your battery.

The number one rule of proper laptop battery care is to NEVER store your battery in a hot place. Cool temperatures are less of a concern, although you can damage a battery if you place it in temperatures well below zero.  

Also, charge level is a factor during long-term storage. Apple recommends that its batteries be stored at a 50% charge level, while many other manufacturers recommend 40%.  A battery that is completely discharged runs a small risk of becoming impossible to recharge if left that way long enough.  A battery at full charge, on the other hand, will tend to lose storage capacity if stored at full charge for a long period of time.

3.     Don’t Use Your Laptop in Bed

This is the heat issue again.  Your bed, your couch, or even your pants can serve as an insulating material that increases the temperatures inside a laptop. This can damage your battery’s storage capacity over time, as well as cause damage to the laptop components themselves.

Although the lap desks may seem silly, they’re not without purpose.  You can place your laptop on a flat, cool surface. This ensures that air continues to flow normally through the laptop and temperatures are kept as low as possible.

4.     Cycle Your Battery Frequently

Most batteries in laptops have a very unusual usage cycle. They’re often partially discharged and then fully or partially recharged, and rarely are allowed to reach a fully discharged state.

The problem with this is that batteries – or at least, the batteries in laptops – do not have a fuel gauge inside of them. The battery life is judged via a digital gauge, which makes its best guess based on the information it knows about the laptops previous charge and discharge cycles. If you do not fully discharge a battery on occasion, the digital gauge will lose its accuracy. This can cause the a perceived sudden drop in battery life if the gauge is over-estimating the remaining charge, or it can cause a perceived loss in battery capacity if the digital gauge is under-estimating the remaining charge.

You don’t need to cycle your battery every day or every time you use it. I recommend doing it once a month. Cycling your battery does not impact battery capacity directly, but it can prevent you from mis-judging a battery’s wear. 

Conclusion

Heat kills batteries. Heat from your laptop, heat from a warm summer’s day, heat from a blanket’s insulation – it doesn’t matter. Extreme temperatures can really chew through a battery, causing a noticeable drop in battery capacity in as little as a year.

Proper laptop battery care means keeping your battery away from heat. It also means cycling your battery to keep an eye on its true capacity and storing your battery if you do not plan to use it for long periods of time. Eventually, a battery will die no matter what you do, particularly if you use it frequently. But proper laptop battery care can mean the difference between a battery that needs to be replaced within a year and a battery that lasts three years or more.