Sudden, complete battery failure

Message

JonathanGennick · #1 Post by **JonathanGennick** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 8:57 am

I've had notebook batteries degrade over time many times, but recently the battery on my wife's Thinkpad simply stopped holding a charge. It won't hold any charge at all, no matter how long I leave the unit plugged in.

The battery is not under warrenty, so I'll have to buy a new one, and that's ok. Things happen and I can live w/the expense. But I'm curious as to whether this is a typical type of failure that I've just not happened to experience before, or whether I've done something to precipitate the problem. Is it relatively normal for a notebook battery to just suddenly fail?

The notebook runs Linux, btw. I have noticed that Linux power management is not so great. When I installed Linux in December 2005, battery life dropped from around two hours to maybe 45 minutes if we're lucky. A typical scenario since has been that my wife would sit down at breakfast, read her email, and often the battery would run down before she was done. So the battery has been cycled a lot. I'm sure that contributes to the failure. Still, such a sudden failure still surprises me.

hcalsos · #2 Post by **hcalsos** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 11:57 am

I have had batteries that suddenly stoped charging, and it turned out to be the charger on the machine itself that was the problem. I had it service, and didnt have any problems after that.
It might also just be that the battery has been worn out. But that is to be expected, after all batteries are only under warranty for 1 year.
Anyway, I'd have the machine cheked out if it is still under warranty.

#3 Post by **GomJabbar** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 12:35 pm

I just had an interesting and similar experience. A couple of nights ago my cell phone was acting a little flaky with the charger. I had to unplug and plug the charger in several times before it began charging. I went to bed, and when I woke up I found the phone was turned off. I could not turn it on.

Where I work, we use a Motorola cell phone that uses the same type of charger. I tried charging my phone with that charger for 1/2 hour, but I still could not turn it on. When I tried my charger with the work phone, it would not charge it, so my charger was dead. Additionally either the phone was dead, and/or the battery was dead.

I went to the store and tried a new battery, and the phone turned on. So I bought a new battery and a new charger. When I got back to work, I discovered that although my phone worked, it would not charge the battery with the charger. I tested the new charger on the work phone, and it was OK. So now I'm about to go back to the store, and see if they will refund me the money for the battery and charger - now that I need to buy a new phone.

Back to your question, I have seen batteries fail suddenly. This is not infrequent with car batteries. These things happen. One of the cells can develop a short or an open circuit.

christopher_wolf · #4 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 2:30 pm

GomJabbar wrote:I just had an interesting and similar experience. A couple of nights ago my cell phone was acting a little flaky with the charger. I had to unplug and plug the charger in several times before it began charging. I went to bed, and when I woke up I found the phone was turned off. I could not turn it on.

Where I work, we use a Motorola cell phone that uses the same type of charger. I tried charging my phone with that charger for 1/2 hour, but I still could not turn it on. When I tried my charger with the work phone, it would not charge it, so my charger was dead. Additionally either the phone was dead, and/or the battery was dead.

I went to the store and tried a new battery, and the phone turned on. So I bought a new battery and a new charger. When I got back to work, I discovered that although my phone worked, it would not charge the battery with the charger. I tested the new charger on the work phone, and it was OK. So now I'm about to go back to the store, and see if they will refund me the money for the battery and charger - now that I need to buy a new phone.

Back to your question, I have seen batteries fail suddenly. This is not infrequent with car batteries. These things happen. One of the cells can develop a short or an open circuit.

I have seen this happen on all kinds of of devices, cell phones, my old Dells, my HP ze5170. Then it would become a game of wiggle-n-jiggle the charger and battery. More common than not. Although my HP had more issues, such that it couldn't charge a new battery to replace the dead one, and the Dells weren't worth spending more, or any, money on.

It could be that the charging circuits in the battery get mis-calibrated or simply that the cells just reached the electrochemical end of their life. Heat and humidity are probably big reasons for this.

440roadrunner · #5 Post by **440roadrunner** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 10:41 am

Just about any electronic device can fail, and all modern Thinkpad batteries not only have batteries in there, they have a considerable amount of circuitry, as well that can fail.

In addition to that, Thinkpads use what in my opinion is a stupid strategy. They use parallelled batteries, which in my opinion increases risk of failure. If one of the two batteries gets a little "ill" it wil kill it's partner next to it.

dsigma6 · #6 Post by **dsigma6** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 11:09 am

Ahh 440roadrunner, harping back to my last battery topic EVER! thread? It didn't go well there either..

#7 Post by **GomJabbar** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 5:24 pm

440roadrunner wrote:Thinkpads use what in my opinion is a stupid strategy. They use parallelled batteries, which in my opinion increases risk of failure. If one of the two batteries gets a little "ill" it wil kill it's partner next to it.

How do you think they get 10.8 volts out of the battery? Clue - it's not paralleled batteries. 10.8 volts is acheived by connecting battery cells in series. Since each battery cell is about 3.6 volts, that means that at least 3 cells are required. Now it is possible to have a series-parallel configuration, so more than 3 cells could be used.

If you get a cell failure in either a series or parallel configuration, this could result in a battery pack that is useless or has substantially reduced capacity. An open cell would kill a series-only configuration. A shorted cell would quickly kill a parallel configuration. A shorted cell in a series-only configuration would result in reduced voltage. An open cell in a parallel configuration would result in reduced amperage or capacity (this is probably the least harmful scenerio).

IMO, it is impractical to design an Intel Pentium M laptop with a single cell lithium battery. 3.6 volts is just too low.

christopher_wolf · #8 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 6:15 pm

That and I don't think that *any* system could run on a single cell lithium ion battery; keep in mind that the "cells" are, suspiciously, the same size and shape as AA batteries and that there there are variations on this inside the Thinkpad and most Intel Pentium M chipsets to conserve power; Low-power Schottky (LS), Fast TTL (F), Advanced Low-Power Schottky (ALS); most common are LS-TTL and HCT. You are going to need a healthy voltage range for simply getting all of them to work correctly; for that, you need several managible cells in the battery pack.

As David pointed out correctly, there are benefits and dis-advantages to the parallel-series batteries; it is, however, far more likely to have a single cell die out than short high in such battery constructs. I suspect that, most likely, there are parallel series of batteries. You have 3 in series then you set them in parallel. Which would, quite nicely, fit the actual dimensions of the Thinkpad batteries, especially on the T Series and R Series, considering that each cell has roughly the same dimensions as an AA battery and there are three in series across with a double parallel to it. Makes sense for, at least, the 6-cell and 9-cell batteries.

vital-analitix · #9 Post by **vital-analitix** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 5:19 am

Li-ion batteries are pretty fragile and can explode.

As such the build in circuitery will shut the battery down when it gets into a "danger" zone.

In addition there is a maximum limit to how much current a Li-Ion battery can deliver. With some high currents it is well possible to "destroy" a battery. I upgraded my CPU to a 2.6 Ghz and the battery cannot cope 100% CPU load for an extended period: I have destroyed two batteries in short timespan with this.

(I presume the current gets too high and the strain on the battery is noticeable by the dramatic voltage drop when running off battery. Running the laptop at the default setting matters improve considerably)

By the way, when replacing a battery use the original IBM battery and not some aftermarket battery. They just do not perform at all. (I too thought "a battery is a battery" but found out the hard way)

440roadrunner · #10 Post by **440roadrunner** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 10:00 am

How do you think they get 10.8 volts out of the battery? Clue - it's not paralleled batteries. 10.8 volts is acheived by connecting battery cells in series

OF COURSE THE HIGHER VOLTAGE is derived by cells in series. However, in the case of the 380XD I used to have, as well as my present 600X's, there are SIX repeat SIX cells in there. There are three in series with three in parallel with the series three.

That means that there are cells in PARALLEL

if you had ever dissassembled one of these, you would know that.

[/quote]A shorted cell would quickly kill a parallel configuration.

Uh, I believe that was exactly my point to start with

#11 Post by **bill bolton** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 6:44 pm

440roadrunner wrote:That means that there are cells in PARALLEL

You're playing fast and loose with engineering terminology. In your example there are two "batteries" in parallel, with each "battery" made up of 3 cells.

The cells are in series, the batteries are in parallel.

Its a very common battery deployment technology and there nothing inherently "stupid" about it.

Cheers,

Bill

440roadrunner · #12 Post by **440roadrunner** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 11:27 pm

Your reply is an incredibly twisted and obtuse evasion of my point. ONE of these thinkpad batteries contains CELLS. There are SIX of these CELLS. There are two sets of three CELLS in series, or to put it another way, every other CELL is parallelled with another CELL.

Its a very common battery deployment technology and there nothing inherently "stupid" about it.

That is your opinion, and I stick by mine. Did you ever consider that if battery manufacturers stayed away from this stupid parallel strategy, that the battery might just last longer? It's one thing to parallel batteries in something like a wet cell application where one can monitor the cell conditions with hydrometers and other equipment, and of course replace failed units, but to seal one up like laptops and other equipment, is, in my opinion, playing fast and loose. I've got several portable radios and other equipment that uses nicad, lith-ion and other types of batteries, and I can tell you this::::

The equipment that does NOT use parallelled cells has a habit of enjoying longer battery life. I've taken many of these apart after failure, and in some cases, replaced cells. In many cases, parallelled cells cause a failure of one pair of two cells, with the others being in relatively good shape, as opposed to the series only units, which tend to simply wear out to the point of poor performance. In those cases---the series only units---there are often more than one cell that is in poor shape, because they are uniformly coming to the end of their life.

Back in the days of my 380XD, I bought a number of dead batteries off of ebay in one lot, and tore them all down. Some had failures of the onboard electronics, but others had one common thread---the failure of one parallel set of two cells. I believe I bought 6 of these, and managed to rebuild them into two good serviceable units. I used them for at least a year afterwards.

christopher_wolf · #13 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 11:49 pm

Wait, what? What was that just now?

In a Thinkpad T4X Series battery 6-cell, you have 2 rows of three batteries each [2, 3] (RowMajor, ColumnMinor). I have reason to think that each of these rows, of three batteries, is connected in parallel; that gives us two rows in parallel, each row having three batteries that, I assume, are connected in series. The thing that you get now is two parallel rows of 3-series batteries. Should a battery in one row short high, unlikely, then you would have a problem. If one was to simply die before the other then that would take out at least one row. Treat the internal resistance like 2 sets of 3-Series-Resistors in parallel. From that standpoint, it seems as if it was the easiest solution to apply given materials cost and reliability; but then, even if something went wrong with only a single cell in any setup, the microcontroller on the battery would still not know how to deal with such a failure state. They aren't designed to handle a failure state such as that, at least I know of none that are. All they are designed to do is to provide a concise hardware interface to the various characteristics of the battery. So even if the cell layout was changed, you wouldn't get a huge increase in reliability. Besides, I have seen devices running on all sorts of battery types go kaputski pretty quick and I can guarantee you that no matter how much engineering was put into the device's battery pack, it would have gone one way or another.

#14 Post by **bill bolton** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 3:26 am

440roadrunner wrote:There are two sets of three CELLS in series, or to put it another way, every other CELL is parallelled with another CELL.

In engineering terms you are completely wrong.

wilsonhs · #15 Post by **wilsonhs** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 3:50 am

Sorry guys, but i have a simular problem
My x20 with 2 brand new batteries wont charg,
plugging in the ac adapter, and the power led just change to orange, and wont charge the battery, no beeps when plug in battery or take out it.
The machine works fine when on ac power.
So, Do u all think is the problem of the Machine's Mobo, or the adapter's voltage problem?
But one thing i can sure is the both batteries are BRAND NEW genuie from IBM Hong Kong.

dsigma6 · #16 Post by **dsigma6** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 7:17 am

wilsonhs wrote:Sorry guys, but i have a simular problem
My x20 with 2 brand new batteries wont charg,
plugging in the ac adapter, and the power led just change to orange, and wont charge the battery, no beeps when plug in battery or take out it.
The machine works fine when on ac power.
So, Do u all think is the problem of the Machine's Mobo, or the adapter's voltage problem?
But one thing i can sure is the both batteries are BRAND NEW genuie from IBM Hong Kong.

ask roadrunner.

440roadrunner · #17 Post by **440roadrunner** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 11:51 am

In engineering terms you are completely wrong

I'm going to take a wild guess here, and guess that you are no engineer, and that you have never taken apart any Thinkpad battery packs.

The battery is made of SIX CELLS. there are PAIRS of PARALLELLED cells, these pairs of which are then in SERIES. These are strapped together with welded conductors.

dsigma6 · #18 Post by **dsigma6** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:41 pm

roadrunner, are you purposely not following the red text at the bottom of bill bolton's signature? for the love of god!

440roadrunner · #19 Post by **440roadrunner** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 4:21 pm

roadrunner, are you purposely not following the red text at the bottom of bill bolton's signature? for the love of god!

I have no idea of what you are talking about, and what does that and the love of God have to do with this battery thread?

#20 Post by **bill bolton** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 6:04 pm

440roadrunner wrote:I'm going to take a wild guess here.

Indeed you seem to making as speciality of it!

and guess that you are no engineer, and that you have never taken apart any Thinkpad battery packs.

Wrong on both counts.

The battery is made of SIX CELLS. there are PAIRS of PARALLELLED cells, these pairs of which are then in SERIES. These are strapped together with welded conductors.

Not for the 600 or T4x batteries I have had apart.

Tilyou · #21 Post by **Tilyou** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 6:19 pm

JonathanGennick wrote:I've had notebook batteries degrade over time many times, but recently the battery on my wife's Thinkpad simply stopped holding a charge. It won't hold any charge at all, no matter how long I leave the unit plugged in.
The battery is not under warrenty, so I'll have to buy a new one

If your experience is like mine on an X23, you'll find the problem is not with battery even though the battery appears to hold almost no charge whatsoever (or just enough to allow entry into hiberation). One clue may be that the battery probably doesn't feel warm -- it's dead, but it's also not charging.

The problem is, I can't tell you how I fixed it, and if this seems odd, I agree. I think I did ordinarily dumb things -- pulling out the battery while the machine was running and then pulling the AC; so naturally the machine crashes immediately. Before that you might try something less destructive, like going to a system restore point a day before the problem. I think I also looked into the bios, mucked around (probably ending up in the same place) and rebooted. Maybe nothing I did had any effect, but just diddling with the machine helped temporarily end some tiny short, or something.

G'luck

til you1 @aol .com

dsigma6 · #22 Post by **dsigma6** » Sat Jul 15, 2006 12:58 am

ok roadrunner- i dont mean to beat the dead horse, but you read the comment in red in his signature i presume...and you can most certainly see what im trying to say.

...or is ignorance truly bliss?

christopher_wolf · #23 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Sat Jul 15, 2006 1:13 am

Location, Location, Location!

Anyway. I have pretty much lost track of this thread; what again is going in what battery where?

The T4X batteries are significantly different from the older Thinkpads and even the R Series.

dsigma6 · #24 Post by **dsigma6** » Sat Jul 15, 2006 2:00 am

there was a point to all of this? [censored] what am i doing here?

im glad that we all agree on the battery topic and can put this to rest . . .

440roadrunner · #25 Post by **440roadrunner** » Sun Jul 16, 2006 9:19 am

Bill Bolton, I've had about enough

First you tried to tell me that I said

""In your example there are two "batteries" in parallel, with each "battery" made up of 3 cells. ""

I said no such thing

Then you said that

""In engineering terms you are completely wrong""

Then you claim that you are an engineer, but you have no factual arguement to prove I'm wrong. Before I started this, I DID LOOK at the last 600X battery that I dissected, just to make ABSOLUTELY SURE. Guess what?

There are 6 cells, pairs of which are paralleled, and each paralleled pair of which are SERIES

You keep telling me that I'm wrong, but you offer no factual proof. You twist my words, claiming, for example, that I confused "battery" with "cells" which I did not do.

As a moderator, I'm getting pretty tired of your personal attacks without factual arguement.

Where I may or may not be located has nothing to do with whether I know the difference between series and paralleled cells in a battery. I certainly have enough experience to know what batteries I've owned failed, and have dissected them to attempt to find out why.

I'm sticking to my guns here: Paralleled cells in a battery are a poor strategy and lead to early failure. This has been my experience in real world equipment over the years.

Your claim that this is "wrong" is not backed up by any factual evidence

dsvochak · #26 Post by **dsvochak** » Sun Jul 16, 2006 10:03 am

JonathanGennick asked:

I'm curious as to whether this is a typical type of failure that I've just not happened to experience before, or whether I've done something to precipitate the problem. Is it relatively normal for a notebook battery to just suddenly fail?

While most of the discussion that follows this is interesting, it doesn't seem to provide a direct answer to the questions. I'm not an engineer and don't care how batteries operate. Since I don't have the option to choose between "parallel" or "series" batteries, how it's constructed isn't a relevant consideration for me.

The questions were "Is it relatively normal for a notebook battery to just suddenly fail?" and "whether I've done something to precipitate the problem?" My experience (using notebooks regularly since 1992) is it's not normal. Never had it happen. Maybe I'm just lucky.

I would like to know, though, whether this issue is like a hard drive crash where there are two categories of people: those it has happened to and those it will happen to. And whether there are things one could do which might "precipitate the problem".

JonathanGennick · #27 Post by **JonathanGennick** » Sun Jul 16, 2006 10:14 am

Thanks dsvochak, for bringing this thread back on track. (BTW, I used to live in Lansing, not the same as East Lansing, but nearby) And now that I'm reminded again of my wife's battery problem, I also realized I haven't yet borrowed my mother's known-good battery. Mom has the identical model as my wife. I'm going to swap batteries today and see what results I get. That'll probably confirm that the problem really is with my wife's battery, and that's ok. Confirmation is good.

quink · #28 Post by **quink** » Sun Jul 16, 2006 10:52 am

Just curious if any of you have seen this message in the message center:
"Irreparable damage to the battery has been detected. Replace the battery with a new one."
My laptop is less then 4 months old and i just got that notice yesterday. Seems to be working fine though.

quink · #29 Post by **quink** » Mon Jul 17, 2006 4:10 am

The message center, the program located in start>programs>thinkvantage and also seen in the productivity center, there is a square for it at the bottom.
Haven't done anything unusual, only thing different is I've been traveling a bit this last month. Battery seems to be working fine and thats the only place in the computer that tells me I have a problem. I'll just contact tech support when i get back to the states next week and see what they say.

JonathanGennick · #30 Post by **JonathanGennick** » Mon Jul 17, 2006 7:34 am

quink wrote:Just curious if any of you have seen this message in the message center:
"Irreparable damage to the battery has been detected. Replace the battery with a new one."

My wife runs Linux. There is no message center in Linux. All those nice, Thinkpad utlities are Windows-only.

I never did get over to my mother's yesterday, to test swapping her battery into my wife's machine. I'll try and remember to do that today.

Sudden, complete battery failure

Sudden, complete battery failure

Re: Sudden, complete battery failure

Will borrow mom's battery

Who is online