R50e battery charging issue

[Philippe Laurichesse]

I just got an R50e whose battery, at first, charged extremely slowly. (It took 20 minutes to go from 1% to 2%.) Then, after it attained 3%, it became 100% in about 10 minutes.

Can anyone tell me what's going on ?

The battery's meter tells me that its cycle count is 8 and it was first used in May 2009. The battery health is green.

[Harryc]

Try running through a couple of complete charge/discharge cycles and report back then. It could have just been a battery meter anomaly, or it could be a bad cell or two in the battery. Less likely is a defective charging system in the laptop. You really need to test more to see how it behaves.

[Philippe Laurichesse]

I'll try that. If it turns out to be a bad cell, how serious is the problem ?
The battery is IBM, manufactured by Panasonic. It looks like it was manufactured in 2005 but not used until 2009.
Again, I'll post more after the charge cycles.

[Harryc]

It's not a serious issue, but you'll have to replace the battery. A telltale sign is if a similar situation occurs on the discharge cycle. In other words the battery might discharge to 70% and then suddenly drop to zero. 4 to 5 years is a long shelf life for a Li-Ion battery. I've had several over the years that old that came out of an unopened box and couldn't hold a decent charge.

[Philippe Laurichesse]

I admit I haven't got around to testing it yet. (I've been leaving the laptop running on AC power with battery attached.) But perhaps I should just forgo the testing and get rid of the battery. It seems that the risk of explosion outweighs trying to find out whether it's NOT a bad cell. Am I overreacting ?

Someone on forum.notebookreview.com wrote :

the battery is probably kept too long in storage and couple of the cells are probably near failure. I would stop using it if i was you.

there is the always the chance of [it exploding], especially in the IBM Thinkpad batteries, since there is no safety switch circuit installed like the one on Lenovo Thinkpad.

???

In passing, since 9 October, the battery has not acted up. Remained at 100%.

[Philippe Laurichesse]

My previous post wasn't to refute anyone's advice. I realize that I am responsible for any advice that I choose to follow or not follow.

That said, since there has been no new postings, I wanted to mention that the poster I quoted in my previous note added :

it probably won't explode as such.. you could try to do a couple of discharge and recharge cycle, and see how that goes. It is no more dangerous than using a generic battery off ebay.

Which of course is what Harryc suggested. So perhaps I will go ahead and test the battery out after all.

I have not found any reports about R50e batteries exploding - I'm thinking of the Sony battery recall - so I think I won't be throwing out the battery just yet.