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Brand New Genuine T410/T420 battery not charging.

T400/T410/T420 and T500/T510/T520 Series
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Fosgate
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Joined: Thu Feb 13, 2020 3:30 am
Location: Sydney, AU

Brand New Genuine T410/T420 battery not charging.

#1 Post by Fosgate » Thu Feb 13, 2020 4:00 am

Hey all,

I want to get some advise from you before I dive into this further.
So I have purchased half a dozen brand new genuine Lenovo T410/T420 batteries recently, they came in genuine Lenovo box with the seal intact. The date on them is 2011.08 so they are nearly 9 years old and I guess they have not been charged since.

So I have installed one of them in my T420 after it booted into windows, opened the power managed and the first message I got was that battery is in good condition, with 0% charge. Looking at the voltage it was showing 0.01v. After around 10 second the messaged has changed to battery cannot be detected with the cross appearing on the power managers icon on the task bar.
I checked another 3 batteries and they have all done the same thing.
Now I understand whats going on, the controller in the battery is disabling the battery as the voltage has dropped the below set threshold however I'm wondering if anyone has every tried re-enabling the controller so the battery can accept charge again.

What Im thinking is I want to try, before connecting the battery to the laptop and getting them to be disabled again I want to try to drill two small holes in the battery cases in either side (I know exactly where to drill as I have an old battery which I have opened) without damaging the cells inside, and connecting an external charger which should bring the battery voltage to operational 11-12v, thus bring the voltage above the threshold which I believe is set to around 7v.

Wondering if anyone has done this.
Would be a waste not be able to use this genuine batteries in all the thinkpads I have here.

BillMorrow
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Re: Brand New Genuine T410/T420 battery not charging.

#2 Post by BillMorrow » Thu Feb 13, 2020 1:33 pm

hello and welcome to the forum..
that is sure a novel approach to recovering a NOS battery.. :)
IF you give that a try i would sure use a charger for Li batteries BUT i'm not so sure it would work since those external chargers (see amazon) used for charging Li battery cells expect to see a controller.. i've been warned that Li batteries can explode or catch fire or otherwise melt down if charged without a charge controller..
Bill Morrow, kept by parrots :parrot: & cockatoos
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She was not what you would call refined,
She was not what you would call unrefined,
She was the type of person who kept a parrot.
~~~Mark Twain~~~

Fosgate
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Feb 13, 2020 3:30 am
Location: Sydney, AU

Re: Brand New Genuine T410/T420 battery not charging.

#3 Post by Fosgate » Thu Feb 13, 2020 11:49 pm

Thanks for your reply, I will be using Li-ion battery charger that can charge each individual cell or combined at the output voltage (what I need in this case). I'll be limiting the current to around 20mA to start with and after couple of hours will increase it to around 1A. I will get back to you with my findings :)

RealBlackStuff
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Re: Brand New Genuine T410/T420 battery not charging.

#4 Post by RealBlackStuff » Fri Feb 14, 2020 1:34 am

Lovely day for a Guinness! (The Real Black Stuff)
Lenovo: X240, X250, T440p, T480, M900 Tiny.

PS: the old Boardroom website is still available on the Wayback Machine
.

Jake.Werecat
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Re: Brand New Genuine T410/T420 battery not charging.

#5 Post by Jake.Werecat » Fri Feb 14, 2020 5:48 pm

Yeaaa, got the very same problem with hell lot of 44 4-cell batteries for X230 :(
T470

Fosgate
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Feb 13, 2020 3:30 am
Location: Sydney, AU

Re: Brand New Genuine T410/T420 battery not charging.

#6 Post by Fosgate » Sat Feb 15, 2020 2:28 am

I'll be trying this tonight and will let you know how it goes...

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