First Time Charging

[netboy]

I have brought a brand new 9 cell Lithium Ion battery for my lenovo thinkpad T61 laptop. I read the instruction for charging the battery in the following URL.
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail. ... 3QNQJN#New

It says,

If your battery is brand new and you are charging it for the first time, your battery may not be charged to full capacity due to characteristics of chemicals in the cell. To obtain maximum performance, all chemical materials in the battery must be fully activated. In order to achieve this:

* Cycle the battery (fully charge, then fully discharge) three times.
* Cycling the battery three times is also recommended if you have stored the battery for a few months.

It also says the following, which is contradicting.

Do not deep-discharge Lithium Ion batteries.

So how do I charge/discharge it for the first time? Can I charge my Li-ion battery to 100% and then discharge it to 0% three times?

Please suggest.

Thanks,
netboy

[dr_st]

Welcome to the forum, netboy.

None of this is truly mandatory. Just start using your battery and enjoy. You may choose to do a full discharge-charge (100% to 0%) every now and then if you want to calibrate the gauge with better accuracy.

[netboy]

Welcome to the forum, netboy.

None of this is truly mandatory. Just start using your battery and enjoy. You may choose to do a full discharge-charge (100% to 0%) every now and then if you want to calibrate the gauge with better accuracy.

You may be talking about Ni-Mh batteries

[Thinkpad Lover]

Nope, he's referring to Lithium-ion batteries, and he knows what he's talking about

First, install Lenovo Power Manager if it is not already installed on your laptop. This will help you to gauge battery life and fine tune your power settings.

Also, go here for some useful info. : http://batterycare.net/en/guide.html#descTot

If I had a Brand New T61 battery I certainly would *not* waste my time (and also put unnecessary wear/stress) on my battery by fully charging/fully discharging it 3 times to deep discharge levels. I would simply charge it overnight, then discharge it to about 10 minutes remaining the first time. Then just use it normally- charge to 100%, discharge it to 50%, 20%, 10%, whatever. I would then only deep discharge it to 0% (that is, perform a full calibration as described in the guide above) if I noticed the battery meter was way off, showing 30% or the equivalent of 30 minutes remaining yet suddenly hibernating or something like that.

Daniel.

[netboy]

If I had a Brand New T61 battery I certainly would *not* waste my time (and also put unnecessary wear/stress) on my battery by fully charging/fully discharging it 3 times to deep discharge levels. I would simply charge it overnight, then discharge it to about 10 minutes remaining the first time. Then just use it normally- charge to 100%, discharge it to 50%, 20%, 10%, whatever. I would then only deep discharge it to 0% (that is, perform a full calibration as described in the guide above) if I noticed the battery meter was way off, showing 30% or the equivalent of 30 minutes remaining yet suddenly hibernating or something like that.

So do you mean that the deep discharge is not required at all (even for the first use), unless the battery is having a performance issue? As I understood from your reply, I can charge the battery (with the laptop turned off) for 12 hrs and use it without doing anything additional.

I'm asking this again because you are telling me to do the exact opposite of the "Brand New battery usage tips" specified in the lenovo URL.

Please reply.

Thanks

[Thinkpad Lover]

I am offering you advice, and that's what this Forum is all about. You will make your final decision and take responsibility for it. It's your battery. This is not a major issue. Doing 3 full charge/discharge cycles should not make a major impact on your battery. So just go ahead and do that if you wish. I am assuming this is a Brand New, genuine Lenovo battery. However, in my humble opinion (from having bought/sold and used hundreds of Lithium-ion laptop batteries, and quite a few brand new ones), I think it is unnecessary and unwarranted. Giving it a full charge overnight and following the steps I have outlined should be sufficient and no, I wouldn't bother with a full, deep discharge unless there was a noteworthy performance issue/need for calibration.

Daniel.

Note to moderators: By the way, this topic is in the "Thinkpad X6x Series incl. X6x Tablet" section. OP is asking about a *T61* battery.

[dbuss]

You may find this interesting.

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/arti ... _batteries

[pkiff]

[Moderator's Note: Moved from X6x forum]

Welcome to the forum, netboy!

I'm not a battery specialist and so can't say for sure about the best way to deal with your batteries, but I wonder if the conflicting advice you are reading in that Lenovo page has to do with differences between NiMH and LiIon batteries. Perhaps the "deep discharge" advice is intended only for NiMH, which seems to be the focus of the article. The information about LiIon has been added as an afterthought. This would also explain why the pictures are from versions of the Power Manager that are probably 5 years out of date.

I have always found the batteryuniversity site that dbuss references to be an accurate and useful reference for laptop batteries. The page that dbuss links to explains that (as others have suggested here), your Thinkpad's LiIon batteries don't require "priming" or deep cycle conditioning before use. I would make sure to do a full charge before using them.

Phil.

[netboy]

but I wonder if the conflicting advice you are reading in that Lenovo page has to do with differences between NiMH and LiIon batteries. Perhaps the "deep discharge" advice is intended only for NiMH, which seems to be the focus of the article. The information about LiIon has been added as an afterthought. This would also explain why the pictures are from versions of the Power Manager that are probably 5 years out of date.

Yes, that's right. The paragraph, which explains the first use of new Battery doesn't talk about "deep discharge". It says, fully discharge. This might be different from deep discharge.

I have always found the batteryuniversity site that dbuss references to be an accurate and useful reference for laptop batteries. The page that dbuss links to explains that (as others have suggested here), your Thinkpad's LiIon batteries don't require "priming" or deep cycle conditioning before use. I would make sure to do a full charge before using them.

I don't understand what you mean by dbuss. Anyway, I have fully charged my battery for 12 hrs, gave a rest for 2 hrs after charging and used it for 5hrs and 50 minutes continuously, until it reaches "10 minutes remaining (less than 3%, 2.6% or something)". Then I manually shut my computer down and removed the battery today evening. I will charge it again tonight for 12 hrs.

I think 6 hrs is a good performance.

By the way, I found the following in the Battery Information. Why the last full capacity is lesser than design capacity?

design capacity: 84240 mWh
last full capacity: 82380 mWh

Thanks,
netboy

[pkiff]

I don't understand what you mean by dbuss.

dbuss is just the username or ID of the person who posted the link to batteryuniversity above. The user ID appears in the left "author" column beside the "message" they posted.

Phil.

[loyukfai]

By the way, I found the following in the Battery Information. Why the last full capacity is lesser than design capacity?

Manufacturing differences. Like not every CPU has the same voltage requirement, and not every egg has the same weight.

In the beginning, sometimes the last full charge capacity is higher sometimes it's lower, but in the long term it will become lower and lower.

Cheers.

[netboy]

In the beginning, sometimes the last full charge capacity is higher sometimes it's lower, but in the long term it will become lower and lower.

Right, for the second charging, last full capacity is higher than the design capacity.

Similarly, the design voltage of my battery is 10.8V. But the Present Voltage is around 11V and sometimes it is 12V. It is varying. I don't know why it is like this. I believe that the voltage should be fixed (10.8V). Will this variation create any problems to the hardware, as it is higher than the design voltage?

cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state

[loyukfai]

Disclaimer: I'm not a chemistry specialist.

AFAIK, there are safety voltage ranges that various types of lithium rechargeables (LiIon, LiPoly...) should operate in. I'm rather sure that the controller inside the battery will take care of this.

IIRC (see, I'm writing this just from memory and I'm *not* a specialist... : ), if you go beyond the upper limit, the cell may go volatile (think about fire, explosion...), and if you go beyond the lower limit, the cell may become dead.

Of course, sometimes issues still come up, and you see batteries being recalled (even when a product is pretty old by IT standard - Apple is re-calling the 1st gen. Nano!), but given the percentage, I would say the (big) manufacturers are doing a pretty good job, understandably because of the dangers (and the potential lawsuits from actual incidents).

There are probably manufacturing differences as well, and sometimes the controller behaves too careful, and that's why I think fully working batteries can die in one day.

But it's better safe than sorry.

Just like the expiry dates on food products, the range is probably good for most, maybe 90-99%, but not all (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_life for more information).

For this type of thing they may just use a rating that's 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999% safe.

Another good reason why it's a good idea to get a battery from a reputable vendor - At least if something occurs (under normal conditions), you have a higher chance to get compensated.

Cheers.

P.S. BTW, you really should check out the site the forum member dbuss mentioned in an earlier post if you want to know more about batteries...(http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 92#p655092)