How is your Thinkpad Sanyo battery holding up?

My x220t's regular 6-cell battery is LG and my slice battery is sony.

 

Not good!

Holding 47%/ Condition Poor /40 Cycles


Sanyo manufactured 22/07/2011
First Used 08/11

Design Capacity 63Wh
Current Capacity 29.97

 

My new (or rather I should say used) X201's 9 cell has 87/94 WHr and 43 charge cycles. Did Panasonic just never produced that many batteries compared to Sony/Sanyo?

 

Did you try doing a reset?

 

Yes I have done a reset. I contacted Lenovo and they are sensing out another battery.
The drop was 53 % and it was sudden, there was no 'wearing effect'.

 

I just ordered a 4-cell battery from Lenovo UK. No idea if it's still gonna be a Sanyo. This really sucks.

 

Sorry about the spelling error. (should be sending)

I will report what make of battery cell is sent to me in a few days, hopefully it will be something other than Sanyo.

 

Besides the 6 and 9 cell, is there any lighter weight battery for the T60? (all I need is 1.5 hours of battery life for powerpoint presentation)

 

6 and 9 cells are the only thing you will get.

 

Will the Ultra bay battery last over an hour?

 

for which model machine are we talking about?

 

It's Advanced Ultrabay Battery for T60p, part number is 40Y6789 or 57Y4536

 

that in a T60p will probably add like 30 to 50 minutes when used in performance mode. Not really worth getting, and they will wear out fast.

 

My "new" second battery on the T61 shockingly lost 26% of charge capacity already with only 30 cycle counts and battery thresholds set (Full Charge 41.71Wh, Original Capacity 56.16Wh), the first one is pretty much dead as it cuts off with around 56% charge left. I probably going to do a reset on my second battery but Sanyo's are really appalling in terms of longetivity for this generation.

 

Sanyo the name in high quality battery.... does Sanyo make anything that resembled high quality?

 

If you rearrange the letters and drop the a, you get SONY, and we all know the problems they had with exploding batteries.

 

Sony does make Xplod sound system, so i guess they weren't really kidding.

 

Just to add, I was doing a clean install recently after a years of use on my ultra bay and main batteries.

The main battery is a Panasonic manufactured 7/09 and first used 9/09. Now I read you were lucky if you got a Panasonic on forums.thinkpad because they have better batteries than the Sony's. Well mine has a cycle count of 341 and max capacity has dropped from 43.29Wh to 36.22 Wh - That's down to 84% of original capacity.

The ultra bay is a sony manufactured 9/10 and first used 12/10. Ironically, even though it has more cycles per month compared to the Panasonic (even though the panasonic has more absolute cycles) it has faired better! The cycle count is 289 and capacity has dropped from 31.32Wh to 29.05Wh - 93% of original capacity. Sure it's a year newer, but it's been abused a lot more than the main battery in that year.

If you normalize the results according to % of total capacity lost per cycle (although I'm not sure if thats a good statistic to test batteries by, its good enough for comparative purposes) that's a .025% drop per cycle on the Sony ultra bay but a .048% drop per cycle on the Panasonic main..

What this means is, effectively, my Panasonic main battery - which gets used up only AFTER my ultra bay is completely drained - is losing capacity at nearly TWICE the rate of my "crappy" Sony ultra bay battery...

so much for going by what you read on forums

.. I know it's not EXACTLY scientific since the discharge rates and capacity or lith-ion and lith-poly batterys doesn't decay linearly, and the fact that the 1st battery has been sitting around for a year longer probably and is older (even if used less rigorously) probably contributed to its increased degredation. But still.. I'm impressed by this ultra bay batter. I was really worried when I first got my T400s because people said to get the battery life I wanted I needed the ultra bay, and that it would eat through it quickly.. so far so good!

 

The ultrabay battery could also be slightly different. It would be better to compare the main battery versus main battery, etc. But these are all anecdotal evidences and there are many errors with such methods.

However, over the 10 years, the Panasonic battery has stood up to the test of time in terms of overall reliability compared to the Sony or Sanyo. And those whom who had enough Thinkpads and used enough batteries from different makes could probably attest to the fact that Panasonic battery does last longer overall then the other makes in use.

And so far it is the only that i know which did not have major recall on its battery due to early death, overheating or explosion.

 

Their Eneloop series rechargeable batteries are top notch, wonder why they dont implement the same tech into their laptop batteries, or why manufacturers been so slow to adapt this tech, except for the price.

 

Not sure they probably use different technology and manufacturing process.

 

This is a battery I got in a T61, 6-cell Sanyo 92P1137:

Full charge capacity: 16.56 Wh
Cycle count: 22
First used date: 2007-03
Design capacity: 56.16 Wh

it says condition is poor, and
"The battery was completely discharged and needs to be recharged. This might take ten hours or more.

A battery error has occurred. The battery cannot be charged. Replace the battery."

 

Eneloop is NiMH (or at least the 10 I have sitting in my drawer are), which is substantially different from the Li-ion batteries used in laptops. In other news, while I haven't really used my battery (Sanyo), I think it is holding up fine. ThinkVantage reports 95% of original capacity, has around 9 cycles on it, and first use date is like May 12, 2011. Though, it is running in maximum lifespan mode so I don't really know what the max capacity currently is. The one thing I can say, though, is that my estimated run time on battery isn't any shorter than when the machine was brand new.

 

The battery I got in my T60p came with 50Wh, after a reset it went up to 60Wh, but still far from the 84Wh.

 

Yeah, pardon my ignorance, NiMH are heavier, thats probably one of the main aspects?
As for your Sanyo battery - you havent used it at all

Recalibrated my one year old 9 cell Sanyo battery last night, before that it had 70wh out of initial 84wh left, after calibration it went up to 78wh, total 58 cycles, some of them only partial discharges, some half-discharges, only once or twice it was drained close to zero when it simply shut down and showed 0wh left, other than that, no special care, always plugged in, been changing its charging thresholds anywhere from ~40% to ~95%, now its at 50%-95%.
Id say it has held up pretty good, it works when I need it and thats great, now I should go and do some nando4 tweaks to squeeze more juice out of this C2D machine !

 

x220
9 cell Sanyo
Design Capacity: 94
Full charge:91.1
18 cycle count
3.2% wear (according to battery bar), is this number right?
in 6 months

 

W520, 9 cell Sanyo
85 cycles
Design Capacity: 93.25
Full Charge Capacity: 87.53 (6 months)

 

X201
6 Cell
Remaining capacity:48.26 Wh
Full charge capacity: 52.07 Wh
First used: March 2011

 

x220
9 cell Sanyo
Manufactured Date: April 2011
First Used: May 2011
Design Capacity: 94.00 Wh
Full Charge Capacity: 92.74 Wh
110 Cycles (6 months)
Reset @ 100 cycles.

Do you know what are the basis for claiming lenovo the 1 yr battery warranty? I know for MBP's its 300 cycles 80% of design capacity.

 

There is no real basis for claiming warranty it really depends on the warranty support guy's judgement and your explanation of how the battery is not functioning correctly.

 

here's another good one:

Remaining capacity: 0.00 Wh
Full charge capacity: 69.44 Wh
Cycle count: 20
Manufacturer name: SANYO
Manufacturer date: 2008-03-24
First used date: 2008-04
FRU part number: 93P5032
Design capacity: 66.24 Wh

"The battery has failed due to normal wear. The battery cannot be charged. Replace the battery."

no wear and 20 cycles. whoops.

this is from a Z60m, 9-cell:
Full charge capacity: 62.95 Wh
Cycle count: 787
Manufacturer name: Panasonic
Manufacturer date: 2007-04-02
First used date: 2007-05
FRU part number: 921133
Design capacity: 84.24 Wh

 

T410 that I used to have had big 9 cell Sanyo battery while a friend of mine had Edge 15 with 6 cell Panasonic battery, needless to say I was so tempted to talk her into... swapping batteries !
But I wanted to have extra juice and she didnt like the looks of protruding... battery, so we didnt swap em

 

So... I thought the "Design Capacity" was supposed to be a fixed value representing the intended capacity, and the "Full Charge Capacity" was supposed to change with the life of the battery.

I ran my W520 Sanyo 9-cell down to 25% for the first time today, and it jumps to 5%. So I figure I should do a gauge reset, which it is in the process of doing.

What's weird is that HWMonitor now reports a totally different Design Capacity (not sure what Power Manager used to say):
Before reset: 103,496 mWh
After reset: 93,240 mWh

Full charge capacity is down, as expected, but by a whole 10.46 Wh.

Power Manager now also reads 93.24 Wh.

What's going on here?

 

I've never done a reset before, but I thought that's what it was supposed to do? Reconcile the differences between the full charge capacity and design capacity? I'm not sure...

How often are battery resets recommended? I have the setting checked to advise me when it's recommended but it has yet to and I have a good 300 cycles+ between the two batteries now.

 

That's what I thought too, except both full charge capacity and design capacity have changed.

 

Isn't that the correct behavior?

Lets say brand new design capacity is 50wH and full charge capacity is 50wh.

Then you use it a year and full charge capacity is down to 45wH, while design capacity still indicates 50wH.

Now you perform a battery reset, which re-calibrates the design capacity to be equivalent to the full charge capacity. So now both are 45wH.

Isn't design capacity the one it reduces to be equivalent to full charge capacity? I didn't think not doing a battery reset would mess up the % charge reported because regardless of design capacity it calculates it as remaining/full charged.

I think I just confused myself!

 

See, that doesn't make sense.

Say I use it for a year, and full charge capacity is down to 45 Wh. The battery evidently knows this. If so, then the battery would just set design capacity equivalent to full charge capacity upon any change in full charge capacity, making gauge resets and having two seperate values for Full charge and Design capacity redundant.

As far as I can reason, the Design Capacity represents the 0% wear condition of the battery (i.e. the ideal maximum charge it can hold). Full charge capacity represents the current amount of charge it can hold after wear and tear.

Wear percentage is then obviously defined as 1 - (Full charge capacity/Design capacity), which would make sense. If Design Capacity kept changing, then we wouldn't be able to gauge the amount of wear we had.

 

I believe that a battery reset is recommended every 30-ish cycles.

 

This is correct. sometimes other software may report incorrect numbers, so i'd say try the power manager and compare that against other batteries that are the same type as yours.

also I found another one (failed due to normal wear). they just keep getting better.
from an X61:
Full charge capacity: 41.76 Wh
Cycle count: 7
Manufacturer name: SANYO
Manufacture date: 2007-08-20
First used date: 2007-10
FRU part number: 42T4506
Design Capacity: 74.88 Wh

this may have been a "demonstration" laptop to show people what they were getting, or simply docked its whole life. only the palm rest and top cover have some scratches, the rest looks brand new.

 

X200 Tablet 8 cell battery

62/66 WHr, 134 charge cycles. Not too shabby.

 

E420 171 cycles
82% capacity.
Design capacity, 47.52 current full capacity, 38.83.
Seems poor to me, too bad they do not make li-po batteries my understanding is that they keep their capacity longer.
Bought laptop in June, so 6 months, and I have lost 18% of my battery.

 

these batteries only have a 300 to 500 cycles, given that you already have 171 cycles on it, i think it is pretty good.

 

they are rated to hold 80% capacity after 300 cycles, right? so the capacity shouldn't drop much until maybe 250 cycles or so. maybe i'm mistaken and this was only for older apple laptops, but i thought lenovo said the same thing somewhere. can't find it though.

apple has a nice chart for their batteries:
Apple Portables: Determining Battery Cycle Count

this is the only thing i could find from lenovo but it's only for non-removable batteries: http://www1.partnerinfo.lenovo.com/...US_293_15042011_CHANNELENEWSLETTER&RRID=99999
"The sealed battery is designed for ultra-thin products and will last 3 times
as long as a typical notebook battery. The typical user experiences up to
300 charge & discharge cycles per year. This 1000 cycle battery is designed
to last over 3-years."

 

1000 cycle is really optimistic

 

The X1 and Macbook Air uses Li-Poly cells not Li-ion cells.

For Sanyo batteries 300 to 400 charge cycles are probably the most you could expect out of them, which for lot of people is around 2 years of use (if you stop top up charging and what not).

I have lot of Sanyo batteries that died within 200 cycles (which is around 2 years of use).

 

Yeah like i said why can't we have removable li-po batteries.

 

i haven't seen many manufacturer using removable li-poly batteries in laptops yet.

 

the X300/X301 have this. and if you look at the first page someone had an X300 with a sanyo battery, and after almost 500 cycles it was doing well. i wonder how it is now.

 

only the 3 cells main battery is li-poly on the X300/X301, the 6 cells is Li-ion. The ultrabay battery has Li-ion sticker but doesn't say anything on the Thinkvantage Power Manager battery information tab.

I think the li-poly cells are flat packed, while the li-ion cells are cyclindrical or close to cyclindrical.

 

My Sanyo battery is toast. Been looking for a replacement but not sure what I want to do.
Genuine thinkpad 9cells are quite expensive. Ebay replacements look quite tempting at 30-50$ but despite their great feedback, most people here (nbr) recommend to stay away. I'm a little undecided. What have you guys done about your dead battery?