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Idea #12374: advanced battery charging mode

bug This idea is a duplicate of Idea #81: Power Management.
Written by trylik the 20 Aug 08 at 12:25. Category: Hardware support. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: New
Rationale
when i bought ibm x40 there was win xp by default, it was loaded with special manager for battery - there was an option about charging - you could choose battery saver mode - when you turn it on - your battery first discharges to almost 0%, then charge to 100%

this is of course nice feature, because it saves battery life a lot, but of course it is usable only if you use laptop at home for loger time

i would also like to have an option to refresh battery - in nikon d1 series there is option like this, also there are a lot of chargers for AA batteries, with this function

it just charges to 100% then to 0% a couple of times (i might be wrong with this, expert should confirm it), say 10 times

this would be really great for laptops, and something that windows surely dont have out of the box
Tags: battery

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on5sl (Idea reviewer) wrote on the 20 Aug 08 at 13:48
Letting the charger cycling the battery capacity from 100 to 0% and then from 0% to 100% is indeed a great way to improve the lifetime of the battery.
So you could choose to not load your battery when his capacity is not 100% so it discharges. And when he is for example at 5% the laptop charges until 100% again. But there is one thing...on new batteries it's better the get smaller discharges and on older batteries it's better to have deeper discharges...
This is going to be difficult to implement...You could ask the user how old his battery is... and every time he boots if he wants to start a discharge/charge process only when his capacity is below 90%. Because it has no sense to start this on a nearly full batteries because you waste the number of cycles then.If the user has to go away, he can choose for just letting the batteries to charge until 100%...

FuturePilot wrote on the 20 Aug 08 at 16:40
Lithium Ion batteries do not need charging cycles. This was only necessary with old nickel batteries. Discharging a Lithium Ion battery could actually do it more harm than good.

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

lavinog wrote on the 20 Aug 08 at 21:17
You don't want to do this on modern laptops.
For older laptops it would be better to do this with a live utility cd so you don't damage the operating system when your battery completely discharges...but couldnt you just let the battery run down while in the grub menu?

Richard.Kolodziej wrote on the 20 Aug 08 at 21:32
Like FuturePilot said.

newtesla wrote on the 18 Apr 12 at 15:00
True - calibrating LI-ion cell a.k.a. full charge => discharge => full charge is a waste of recharge cycle, but in modern equipment, such as all laptops manufactured after 2005, Li-ion cells are controlled by electronics which doesn't let cells to discharge below 3.6V each, and only electronic circuit inside a battery pack knows how much "juice" battery has left; sometimes, circuit becomes "dumb", and reports low and critical batt way before reaching 3.6V (3.7V for some manufacturers), but does cut battery off at exact cell voltage, therefore: once in a while, full recharge cycle is going to do some training to the circuit (and do nothing good or bad to the cells) which reports how many watts battery has left.

In addition, battery training program could have something as "old state - new state" kind of statistics; those should be easy to read from... uhh, there should be some interrupt for battery stuff, I think.

Other than that, doing full recharge-discharge-recharge cycle too often (more often than once in a month) is a waste of cycles, and IS going to damage cells, as the procedure is a bit stressfull for cells.


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