Battery Wear Level

Just a heads up to all the studio XPS owners. I opened up HWmonitor to check some temps and I noted the battery wear level and its 23%!!!!!!!! I have only had the laptop since mid February and its degraded this bad very quickly. Needless to say I will be calling Dell and getting a replacement.

But I thought I would bring it to the attention of the community, because its been so helpful for me I try to give back.

 

I noticed the same thing.. I believe they are fairly easy to convince on the issue if my memory serves me correctly.

 

You can also check battery wear this way:

(Dell.com)

Dell will most likely have you do this, so you might as well try it before you call.

 

How many lights you need to get a replacement? mine has one

 

I bought my laptop last september and my battery wear level is 13%

 

nk290:
thats weird. my pretty new, 4% wear level battery shows 5 lights, my 1 year old old 6cell 8% wear level shows 4 lights.. isn't this just the opposite way they say?
edit: or maybe it's just the current charge level and when i hold it down and all lights fade after a few seconds, that's when it shows the degradation meaning that my batteries are fine..

 

Yup, when you press it, it will first show the amount of charge that the battery has. Keep holding it for 3 seconds, then if all the lights fade, your battery has little wear. The more lights after 3 seconds, the more wear.

 

I've had/used my 9-cell battery since July 2009. So far, I have about 8% wear. I noticed it rarely ever goes down as long as I don't drain my battery when I'm out using it w/o the charger. Every instance that I've drained my battery until it shuts down on its own due to low battery, I've lost about 1%. So I've learned to start plugging in the charger when it goes down to like "12 min left." Otherwise, my charger is plugged in all the time.

 

8% wear after nearly a year is pretty good. The laptop battery industry has a pretty bad reputation much like "Printer Inks."

It's generally a good practice to not fully drain your battery all the time, but the 1% loss is probably due to the way the battery reports its health status (measured when hits a low amount of charge). The battery is probably not actually losing 1% of its 'full charge capacity' just from its time of use between being at 10% and being used until the computer sleeps/hibernates/powers down.

 

Did you contact Dell? What did they say? I downloaded HWmonitor and mine has a 23% wear level too!

 

Mine has 4% wear, not sure which battery I'm using though, I have one that I got in December 2009 and the other in October 2009. I don't use it a whole lot, I use the power adapter and it never leaves my workstation pretty much unless I'm on a trip.

 

This brings up the matter of proper storage for me, because since I don't operate on batteries much, they say for inactive long term storage of lithium batteries that it should only have a charge of about 40-60% to maintain optimal health. I'm getting ready now by fully discharging the battery, re-charging to 40-60%, and then I believe there is a BIOS setting that can disable the charging mechanism, and Windows has a setting that can stop charging as well. I'll enable that and switch to the adapter until I need the battery again, at which point I'll give is a full charge.

 

Update: currently actually 9.7% wear for about 10 months of use.

 

Update: I contacted dell and they shipped me a new battery without any headache at all, just called said my battery was dying on me sooner than usual and a new battery came in 2 days.

Also, for the interested, the new battery reported 0% wear but after 3 days of use on the charger and only maybe two hours use on the battery the wear level shows 5%.

 

it all depends on how you use your laptop

if you keep charging or using the laptop on battery power, and recharge when it goes under 90% every day(increasing the charge cycles), your wear level goes up really high

for me, i stay on A/C when possible, and try to minimize the charge cycles...

got my m1330(6-cell) on July 08, now 14.5% wear (according to BatteryBar and Linux Battery Info) Press+hold battery button yields no lights... 49340 mWh out of 57720 mWh designed

also, dell kinda cheats you on the battery wear. For mine, the designed wattage is 56watts, but it actually starts at 57,720 mWh... You get more to start with so that the wattage doesn't fall below 56,000mWh too early, but dell can then use inferior products(probably not, but this is an example) that wear down really quickly

if you are within a year of purchase and have a high wear level, you can call Dell up to complain.. but after a year, you can't... Batteries are considered a consumable item, so Dell doesn't really need to replace a battery with high wear level, but generally will within a year if you can show them a high wear %

 

Let us know how you are going to do it. I have checked the Bios but there is nothing regarding the battery options. Also, in windows 7 I could not find any way to do it.

 

my 6 cell shows just 7% - not bad for 9 months,

 

to show battery wear level there is a tool in HWmonitor, its made by the same people as CPU-Z

 

hmm should i be concerned that i've had my laptop for just under 2 months and my battery wear level is at 16%? i've only had my xps 16 go down to under 25% at most 3 times but mostly have it on A/C

 

I bought my XPS1640 in July 2009. Draining my battery several times in use w/o my charger has given me a value of about a 12% wear, with about 1% wear from each drainage (and there's some views about whether that's good/giving accurate values after drainage or not). But in any case, what is strange is that in my LAST drainage, my wear level went back to 10%. So I guess there may be some variability in measurement. But definitely at least 10% drainage after over a year according to the values. But had I not drain the battery, maybe it may appear (falsely?) as if there is less drainage? *shrug* any experts out there that can comment on that? =)

 

Go to Power Options in the Control panel. There should be an option for "Dell Battery" If you go into there, one of the tabs allows you to disable battery recharging.

 

A safe and simple answer is that the battery only calibrates/updates itself when it you are running on battery power and reach a certain low charge level. There could be some other scheme as well, such as every X months it also updates.

 

18% since august. the heat during gaming is killing it. i took it out yesterday and it was very hot while playing a graphics intensive game.

 

My 1730 has 55% wear level and it's one year and a half old. I should replace it but it still works as an UPS so it's good.

 

You should have tried to catch the wear level right before the 1 year warranty ended to get a free replacement. Batteries are expensive as hell- always feels nice to get something that's useful and of value for free for free that you deserve.

 

Dang, I got my new laptop 2wks ago and HWMon is showing 8% wear already. Should we be worried?

 

So...is your "best practice" to put the laptop into hibernate every time you unplug the AC? It seems like that's the only way to prevent the battery from discharging.

I guess one thing that would be cool is to have a dummy battery that's just an empty shell. Then, swap in a real battery for when you actually need one.

 

now im at 21% damn i only use my laptop on battery 2 days out of the week. if you look up a few posts i was at 18% less than 2 weeks ago.