If you’ve owned more a laptop, and you’ve used their portability often, 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 inevitable result of battery use. Although a great battery can last for many years, even the most well cared for battery will eventually lose its ability to hold a charge. Proper laptop battery care has a huge impact on how long your battery lasts, however.
How do you treat your battery right? Read on to find out.
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 free reign 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, its 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.
Store Your Battery Properly
Surprisingly, laptop battery care doesn’t just mean keeping an eye on 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. Not the attic, not the closet that never gets air conditioning, and most certainly not your car or a storage unit that isn’t climate controlled. Cool temperatures are less of a concern, although you can damage a battery if you place it temperatures well below zero. Although these tips are most critical during long-term storage, the best laptop battery care will pay attention to them at all times. For example, leaving your laptop in your backpack in your car during a hot summer’s day will, over time, damage the battery.
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.
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. Proper laptop battery care asks that users always place their 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.
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. In one instance, I nearly threw out a battery because I’d forgotten to cycle it. When I remembered and did so, I discovered that the battery actually had an additional hour of juice in it. The poor reading I received from that laptop was an error caused by over a year of use without a full discharge cycle.
Conclusion
The main point you should take away from this laptop battery care tutorial is simple. 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 an 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.
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