My laptop is a little over 2 years old. When plugged in it will show 100% charged. But when I unplug and run on battery, it drains very fast. Within a half hour or so.
I found a wikihow article suggested placing a completely drained battery in the freezer for 12 hours, then letting it warm back to room temp, recharging, draining completely, then repeat process 3-4 times.
Has anyone had success with this procedure?
Lithium ion batteries have a lot of great characteristics. They have a very high energy density, which means you can store a lot of energy in a relatively small sized battery. They are light in weight compared to other batteries of the same size. This makes them excellent for use in things like laptops and cell phones, and anything else that is small, light, and uses a lot of power.
Unfortunately, their longevity sucks. Lithium ion batteries begin dying from the moment they are made, and to some extent they will die an early death no matter how well you treat them and what you do to them.
One thing that makes them die even faster is heat, so if the processor in your laptop is close to the battery, then the heat from the processor will likely shorten the battery’s life.
Given that what you are fighting against here is the basic chemistry of the battery, I would be very surprised if any of these online tricks you find do anything useful. If anyone knows why this procedure, or any other procedure, will do anything useful to the battery from a chemistry/physics point of view, I’d love to hear some details about it.
I’ve seen anecdotal evidence that it might help, but most people recommend that you completely discharge it before freezing. Note that it will never be as good as it was when it was new…
OK, this is odd. I figured it couldn’t hurt to give the method a shot. I unplugged laptop, let battery drain and received the low battery warning at 7%. Normally i’ll just plug it back in at that point. I let it continue to drain.
It’s now at 1%…and has remained there for the past 20 minutes. My laptop hasn’t shut down yet. I have music playing and multiple browsers open. Is it possible the battery is fine but somehow my laptop is just reporting the wrong level? What in the world would cause that?
I’m running Windows 10, but the issue was happening even while on Windows 7.
I doubt that your battery is “fine”. Like I said, lithium ion batteries start dying from the day that they are made. They typically last about 5 years or so in a laptop though before they lose too much capacity to be useful.
While it may not be “as good as new”, your battery might be a lot better off than what your computer is saying that it is. Some batteries can be recalibrated. Sometimes just allowing it to run down completely and then recharging it will recalibrate it. Since the freezer method you quoted in the OP includes that step, it may be that this is the only part of the procedure that actually does anything useful, and it’s not recharging the battery’s capability. It’s just getting the battery to report its charge level correctly.
Your laptop may have a battery refresh or recalibrate feature somewhere. Sometimes it is in the BIOS, other times it is in a utility that comes with the laptop.
Update: It actually works, to at least some degree!
As it happens, shortly before this thread was posted, my iPod Touch went kaput. Over the course of about a day, it went from more-or-less normal, to zero battery life. I could charge it for hours, and the indicator would show it as being full, but a few hours of standby, or a few minutes of actual use, would drain it to the point that it wouldn’t turn on.
On seeing this thread, I thought “Huh, it’s worth a shot”. So I waited until it was completely dead (not a difficult task, since this just involved leaving it in my pocket), sealed it in a ziplock bag with as little air as possible (to prevent condensation), and tossed it in the freezer overnight. I took it out still cold, and immediately plugged it in for several hours. Last night, I unplugged it, and left it idling all day today. When I got home, I turned it on, and played around on it for about 10 minutes, after all of which it still shows indistinguishable-from-full on the power meter.
I make no effort to explain how or why this would occur. And I don’t yet know if it’s as good as new, since what I’ve tried with it so far is far short of its normal duty cycle before the battery death. But it’s certainly lasting significantly longer now than it did before I tried the freezing.
Let us know if it lasts. I tried it with a iPhone 4 and it did last quite a bit then the battery noseddived and I lost about 2/3rds of it’s former capacity shortly after, so was much worse off, but did gain some immediate and amazing benefit.
We used to call one of my ex techs “the battery whisperer” He would disassemble LI batterys and had stuff to force charge cells and such. One thing I remember him mentioning is draining LI cells to zero is bad for them. It takes more power to go from 0% to 1% charged in some used batteries than some laptop charging systems can put out. Once it has been charged to 3-4% there is less resistance to overcome to successfully charge and the battery can keep going from there. Cold = less resistance but I am pretty sure the difference is small over typical home freezer temps.
He was far more versed in battery chemistry than I, I will see if I could get him to comment here.
In my case, the device was basically unusable before I tried it, so I really had nothing to lose. But yes, I’ll keep everyone updated.
Update: Five days of standby plus occasional sporadic use didn’t make a dent in the battery. I used it a fair bit today, until it got down to the 20% low battery warning. As is my habit, I put it back on standby shortly after getting the warning, and am now charging it. We’ll see how long the next charge lasts, but if it goes a significant while, too, I think we can officially declare this one confirmed.