Charging To Often?

[hodson]

Let's say my battery gets down to 80% every day after work. When I come home I plug it in to HotSync and charge every night. Then my wife and kids may use it a little bit that evening, taking it back down to say 97%. Then I plug it back in to charge HotSync in the morning before I go to work.

Will I be shortening the overall battery lifespan because I'm not letting it get down lower BEFORE I recharge?

What if I ran the Palm Bench Battery Tester every weekend to "drain" the battery occasionally. Would this extend my battery lifespan?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts/opinions.

[Antipod]

I think draining battery reduces its lifespan. Keeping it fully charged all the time increases it. That's at least what is recommended for Lithium Ion batteries.
There were some threads on this topic - search...

[elf]

Will I be shortening the overall battery lifespan because I'm not letting it get down lower BEFORE I recharge?


Keep it topped-up close to 100%. This is the recommended procedure for Li-ion battery packs.


What if I ran the Palm Bench Battery Tester every weekend to "drain" the battery occasionally. Would this extend my battery lifespan?


No. You would be buying a new battery in a few months.

[illusion4096]

What I noticed on several cellphones: ppl that used their phones (li-ion battery) a lot in combination with their car-kit (charges the battery every time you plug it in) have now a battery that do not last very long.. I guess the same goes for a PDA.

[PDA gadgetfreak]

Originally posted by MartinStockdale
I've just remembered where I recently read about Li-Ion batteries, it's in the latest Harrow Technology Report which you can read here http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20030217/20030217.htm#_Toc32899996

It also contains links to some very interesting information from Panasonic.

Found this post and link in the archives.

[Mastervtec]

My Dad is a tech and he says that contrary to popular belief these li-ion batteries do have a memory. If you discharge as often as you can, the battery will discharge at a slower rate. Try this hodson: Discharge your battery and use it like you do every other day, after a few discharges and recharges see if the battery percent is above 80% after a normal days use.

If the battery seems to go to 80% , or close to it, every day it is because the battery remebers that it will be charged when it gets that low. So it is just discharging at the same rate. If you let it discharge and recharge I bet you will see it upwards of 90% or so.


The above is just my opinion, please don't obliverate it;)

[hodson]

I'm sorry, are you suggesting (I understand it's your opinion) that I discharge it completely every now and then?

[Mastervtec]

Not completely to the extent that you lose all your info, but yes, discharge often. I have done this with all my clies and seem to get exceptional battery life.

[rprice54]

I know it's a different system, but on my 3-year old laptop, I used to carry it with me to class, and just use the 2 batteries to get me through the day. I could get 5 good hours of use off them before they got too low, and then charged at night. And if I wasn't using them much, I would run them down to about 10% once a month or so.

2 years later they provided almost the same charge as when they were brand new. I had friends who always brought their power cords with them and never used just batt power. Within a year their batteries weren't worth crap.

For the past year, my usage has changed, and my laptop sits docked, plugged in all day. I tried using it on a plane recently, and one battery barely lasted an hour. The second did about the same. So I went from 5 hours to under 2 hours.

Yes they were another year old, but the first two years showed verry little decline. I attribute the slide to being plugged in all day.

It's just one person, but it's a three year 'experiment' in battery hygeine.

[rob_squared]

We need ZPE (zero-point energy) batteries that never need to be charged externally.

[buckethead]

my take is to always charge it when it is less than 15% or when the warning pops up. Just doesnt seem right to charge it everytime you had a chance. Unless of course you're travelling or something.

been doing the same thing for 2 years with my cellphone and so far the battery still last about 3 days on average use. I'll have more confidence if Sony uses Li-Polymer on its clies though :)

[Unregistered]

AFAIK, from the sources I trust more (articles with great depth of explanations), Li-Ion and Li-Polymer batteries DO NOT, I say again, DO NOT have memory problem.

Li-Ion batteries' loss of capacity comes from 2 factors, 1) actual usage, and 2) aging.

Li-Ion batteries prefer frequent charges, cool environment. Repeated deep discharge will make the battery life suffer much faster.

When manufacturers quote charge cycles, they usually use a 80% discharge rating. However, Lithium batteries can last longer in partial discharge cycles.

However, the smart battery guage will loss its accruacy over time, therefore a deep discharge can be done to tune the meter again.

In fact, exactly the MEMORY problem is something that's nearly only possible in labortories, the problem originally appeared in satellite batteries.

http://www.buchmann.ca/Chap10-page6.asp

[Unregistered]

Another link with great depth of explanations:

http://www.repairfaq.org/ELE/F_Battery_info.html
http://www.mobileworld.org/info_battery_05.html

In short, the so called "Memory" problem in Ni-Cd and Ni-Mh is in fact a loss of capacity caused by overcharging. However, today people usually refer to any loss of capacity in batteries to "Memory" problem.

A very good explanation written for average man:

http://www.dansdata.com/gz011.htm

[Mastervtec]

Well, I trust what a tech says that works with batteries EVERY day~~ So, I will continue to discharge often :)

[___]

Originally posted by Mastervtec
Well, I trust what a tech says that works with batteries EVERY day~~ So, I will continue to discharge often :)

"a tech" .... uh huh. And my mom is a "scientist". Oh, and my brother is an "engineer." Laffs :)

[Unregistered]

Discharge is fine, actually Li-Ion batteries' life seems to suffer more if you don't use them and stored at high charge and in high temperature environment.

Just don't do complete discharge everytime.

And remember, **true** "memory effect" won't exist in your or my CLIE or any other everyday rechargable batteries we use. :)

[Berto2112]

Originally posted by ___


"a tech" .... uh huh. And my mom is a "scientist". Oh, and my brother is an "engineer." Laffs :)


Just like you're an "intelligent human being"

If you're going to be a troll, do it elsewhere.

[MartinStockdale]

Originally posted by rprice54
I know it's a different system, but on my 3-year old laptop, I used to carry it with me to class, and just use the 2 batteries to get me through the day. I could get 5 good hours of use off them before they got too low, and then charged at night. And if I wasn't using them much, I would run them down to about 10% once a month or so.

2 years later they provided almost the same charge as when they were brand new. I had friends who always brought their power cords with them and never used just batt power. Within a year their batteries weren't worth crap.

For the past year, my usage has changed, and my laptop sits docked, plugged in all day. I tried using it on a plane recently, and one battery barely lasted an hour. The second did about the same. So I went from 5 hours to under 2 hours.

Yes they were another year old, but the first two years showed verry little decline. I attribute the slide to being plugged in all day.

It's just one person, but it's a three year 'experiment' in battery hygeine.

This had been concerning me as well, since I've had the same failure with a laptop battery losing capacity when the laptop is plugged in all the time, and this doesn't seem to fit with Sony's recommendation that you should charge your clie often and not let it run down.

I think the article that unregistered posted from buchmann.ca explains this quite well: the important thing is to remember that the battery in your clie is being discharged all the time - even when the clie is switched 'off', the battery is maintaining the memory.

So the Clie fits into the buchmann definition of 'shallow discharge' - since even left overnight it is discharging the battery, and you are quite OK to charge it regularly.

The laptop battery, however, is not being discharged when the laptop is switched off. Also, when the laptop is being run off the mains, the battery is being kept fully charged. It seems to me that if you plug your laptop in the mains all day the battery is being treated more like the buchmann definition of 'storage', and is effectively being stored at a 100% charge which is definitely not good for them.

Anyway, I'm going to carry on charging my clie every time I hotsync it. For the laptop, I've been able to get a new battery for it, so I'm leaving the old (and virtually useless) battery in it normally, and plug the new battery in when I need to run off battery power. In that way, I hope the new battery will still have a decent life when I need to use it.

[Mastervtec]

Originally posted by ___


"a tech" .... uh huh. And my mom is a "scientist". Oh, and my brother is an "engineer." Laffs :)

Burn in hell, friend.

[Unregistered]

No flame please.... :)

In fact you can make your notebook battery works the same too by using "Standby" instead of "Hibernation" or "Shut Down" if your notebook is ACPI and Suspend-to-RAM complaint (most if not all recent years models are complaint).

In Suspend-to-RAM mode, all your parts are shut down except that a small charge is used to refresh the data stored in the RAM. Of course you have to turn off the AC to let the notebook use the battery.

However, you may need to watch your Power Schemes, personally I don't set auto Standby but only auto Hibernation.

Because if you've set both Standby and Hibernation timers, and the computer is in Standby mode, your system may wake up during your bus trip inside your bag from Standby to go into Hibernation mode.

Unregistered. ;)

[MartinStockdale]

Agreed. Most people tend not to use suspend/standby anyway but actually power off the machine, and as you say the default power scheme tends to switch from suspend to hibernate after a short while anyway, and hibernate is the same as 'off' from a power usage point of view.

I think I'd be a little concerned about leaving a clie plugged into a charger all day every day (eg in a cradle), but I'm happy with the top-up charge it receives whenever I plug it into my hotsync cable.

Time will tell! Maybe in two years time I'll be regretting these words. But, as a lot of people have commented in the past, in two years time I'll probably have bought (or want an excuse to buy) a new Clie anyway, and it probably won't cost much more than the replacement battery for my laptop!

[Talula]

My battery often gets down to about 60% be the end of every day. If I didn't recharge it at night it would be useless before the end of the next day and as I a result, I wouldn't be able to do my job.

I HAVE to charge often.

[Puppy]

Lithium Ion batteries get worn out mostly from the total amount of current that passes through them both ways. Charging them or not shouldn't have much of an effect on the total amount of run time you get out of them.

An explination for those laptop batteries might be that they're being damaged by being connected all the time. Most Lithium Ion stuff warns you not to leave it charging for more than 5 days or so.

I've heard conflicting things on whether or not it's good to condition Li Ion stuff initially.

The only precaution I'd take with a PDA is not to just leave it sitting in it's cradle charging if you're going to leave it for a long time (like days at a time), but otherwise don't worry about it.