Will a laptop battery deteriorate sooner if plugged in most of the time?

Thank you all guys so far for sharing your ideas!
These are the settings I have for battery charge configuration in firmware settings for this laptop (Dell XPS 13 9380):

battery charge

Until now I have had it set to “Primarily AC use”. There is a custom setting which can take values from
50-95.

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So if the laptop doesn’t have a way of setting these then is it best to monitor the battery level and when it hits 40% plug it in and charge to 80% and then unplug it?

@rhz has created a systemd timer to trigger notification for battery charge between a certain min and max level:

I don’t know if there is a way to stop the charging at a certain level even with AC connected. Perhaps some forummate would know.

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Mine are not actually available from the firmware settings, I had to use the Lenovo app to set it in Windows. I didn’t know it existed until I saw the setting in plasma.

I’m using an MSI laptop. In order to change the max battery charging level I need to boot into Windows and launch the MSI utility. Then I can boot back to Linux and the setting remains saved. It’s one of the few reasons I have to keep a Windows partition on this machine.

I guess on other laptops this should work too. If there is a windows utility for that, the setting might remain saved when booting back to Linux. (Which probably means it’s stored in BIOS)

HP has a battery care BIOS utility but unfortunately, my laptop doesn’t have that.

Anecdotal experiences with lithium batteries:

My father used to keep his - rather expensive - HP laptop connected to the outlet almost all the time, as it was rarely used. Its battery degraded extremely quickly, to the point where the laptop wasn’t usable if it wasn’t connected to an outlet after ~2 years (during which he perhaps used the laptop for less than a combined 8 hours).

I have a phone (Mi Mix 3) which I have had for 4-5 years now, and I have not yet experienced any noticeable battery degradation. Perhaps this is a result of it almost never being left plugged to an outlet. I charge it with a wireless charger on my desk, in small bursts.

I had assumed this kind of thing would be hardcoded into the hardware as to prevent it, but perhaps planned obsolescence is all part of the plan.

Question for someone more knowledgeable: I have a laptop I almost never use. It sits in the closet, presumably with an empty battery at this point. Is there harm in letting it drop to zero like this? Should I be charging it now and then?

Shouldn’t really be needed to being charged and discarded, but leaving it with empty battery is very bad for battery health. You should charge it around 50/60% and then power it off and leave it there. I’ve done it with my old smartphone and after something like 6 months the battery was dropped like 2% and worked exactly like 6 months prior.

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Charge it to 50-60% and remove the battery from the laptop1. The battery can be kept like that for years in the closet at comfy room temperature. It will gradually lose charge due to inner resistance and you should not let it drop to 0% (but it will take years for that to happen, so as long as you don’t forget about it, it should be fine). When, after years of storage, you decide to use it again, the battery charge indicator may display the wrong percentage. One full drain+recharge cycle should fix that and bring it back to normal.

1 This is assuming you have a laptop that has a removable battery. If you have one of those crappy laptops where the battery is glued in, you’re screwed. The battery will degrade over time, no matter what you do.

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Wish my old Dell had this and didnt require the battery to actually sit properly in place lol

Its 11yrs old now though so when it goes it goes, battery is newer and still in good shape.

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I think this is why we’re seeing these charging parameters set into firmware lot my Thinkpad. We know it’s not good for the battery, and instead of making the battery removable/easily replaceable - this works enough.

Lenovo is showing on the ideapad the best battery life is charging between 50-65% although shorter use time.

Edit: From what I’ve read the short burst charges are better than a longer charge. I think it has to do with a few factors one being prolonged heat during charge cycle.

Edit2: I think i will employ this methodology to my charge regimen on my HP and lenovo although I’ll probably opt for 40-80% charging.

It would be really cool if one could at least get notifications in KDE when the battery gets too charged or drained in those laptops that don’t have charge limit support. Ideally those notifications could be configured in systemsettings, right there where for other laptops you see the firmware-supported charge limits.

No DE or application can provide anything it is not provided by the hardware/firmware and proper code is open. That’s the Open Source permanent problem… :man_shrugging:

What helps in case of battery is not charging to 100% and not being near 100% (say not going above 80%). Unfortunately its not very convenient to control this max charge percentage manually.
I have seen some OEMs in windows implementing a feature that stops charging the laptop at 80% (if you enable this feature).
Never seen anything like that in Linux world but then I am not sure as I mostly use desktop.
It would be a good feature addition in some Linux OS or DE.

P.S. My job is to design Li-ion battery for electric vehicles so I have good understanding of this thing.

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Simply put when the battery reaches 0% it also reaches its end of life. There is electronic circuitry built into the battery to prevent it from charging once it has reached a certain lower charge level. This is a fail-safe feature, as once the battery fully discharges, an irreversible chemical process occurs inside the battery which would cause the battery to ignite when attempting to charge. The same circuitry would not allow you to discharge the battery below a certain threshold (what it reports as 0% is actually a few percent over 0, as a safety measure), however if you store the battery fully discharged for a few years, there’s a good chance it will deplete below the critical level. As everyone here stated storage level is between 50%-60%.

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It must be possible to at least pop up a notification when 80% is reached… I could do it on my system if I had a battery (even using conky) so the info should be available to script it - and running it every so often to check…

btw - conky can find battery info using any of apcupsd acpi apm smapi interfaces - so it mush be relatively easy to access!

KDE could not stop charging above a set level if the hardware/firmware doesn’t allow it, but it can certainly notify you when the set level is reached, because the hardware/firmware does allow reading the charging level. That’s basically what the systemd/User timer in https://github.com/rhz/sd-battery-notification does. It would be nicer to have better KDE integration though.

Battery quality is varying a lot even if it’s the same model.

My previous laptop’s battery went down to ~80% capacity after about 30 charge cycles and I kept that one pretty much between 10% and 90% charged.

With the current laptop (same battery model) the battery still has ~92% capacity after about 50 cycles even though I don’t care anymore about a charging threshold. I run to a 100% and also discharge it below 5% from time to time…

Leave it up to the BMS to take care of battery health/life.

IIRC when I was using Plasma, there was a Battery/Power page in settings and/or Info.

That’s not always true (for Linux). The hardware provides signals, but if the OS/software doesn’t know how to translate them, they are unusable.
Lots of laptops’ battery status is usable, but I am not sure about all of them.

It’s a standard Open Source issue. :man_shrugging:

The linked service is a handmade one, which needs user editing, in case the BAT0 (usual battery name) is different. Also the values being read are what Linux usually finds. I am no expert. Just posting my experience… :angel: