Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

electronics.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 362 posts

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#231

Post by bayindirh »

dalore wrote: post #225
bayindirh wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally do mundane tasks like SSH sessions or zoom meetings when I'm on battery. Heavier tasks are always offloaded to my desktop system, most of the times, so running on battery here and there doesn't impact many things in my case.

A video call though isn't that mundane. Google Meet often has my cpu and fans spinning. I do prefer Zoom as it uses fewer resources. But of course, it will work on battery.

For an M1 powered MacBook Air, none of them creates a significant power spike on the system. I use both regularly, generally one hour at a time, and battery percentage doesn't take a noticeable hit after the call, and the computer doesn't warm up.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#232

Post by londons_explore »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #150
Reason077 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load" It wasn't what Apple was doing that was the problem, it was the fact that they were initially quite secretive about it! People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation. Now days iOS tells if your battery no longer supports peak performance, which is the right thing to do. > "Yes, they s…

I wonder how many products have components that downgrade under specific situations and they never explicitly tell the customer - and most customers don’t ask because it’s “complicated tech” they don’t want to know about it.

plenty. But normally the degradation is more gradual and automatic. For example, as the innards of your clothes dryer gets clogged up with lint, at some point the thermal cutout will cut in and out to briefly reduce the heat.

End result is your old clothes dryer starts taking longer and longer to dry clothes.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#233

Post by francisofascii »

gwbas1c wrote: post #218
p1necone wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure most (all?) manufacturers already do (the first part of) this. 100% can't be the point at which the battery literally stops taking new charge - if you did that they'd catch fire all the time. It's just that the manufacturers idea of what "100%" should be generally skews more towards the immediate battery life end of the tradeoff, whereas some users prefer to have "100%" closer to the maximizing long t…

I wish my Tesla did that

The Prius Prime supposedly does this. It charges to 80% internally but displays as 100%, although usually drivers have the display set to "miles remaining" rather than the battery percentage. I vaguely remember the manual referring to this.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#234

Post by sgarland »

venj wrote: post #169
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many products have components that downgrade under specific situations and they never explicitly tell the customer - and most customers don’t ask because it’s “complicated tech” they don’t want to know about it.

I think a lot of laptops do this because their cooling system is too weak for the CPU. The Lenovo Thinkpad t480s comes to my mind: with factory settings, the CPU was unable to reach its advertised boost frequency nor maintain its max non-boost frequency for more than a few minutes. After 5 to 10 minutes, the machine was usually running at 300/400mhz under its advertised clock speed. Undervolting helped a lot but coul…

IMO, at least with x86, there is a point where it simply doesn’t make sense to cram higher clocks into a laptop. The last Intel MBP could be had with an i9, and IME if you left turbo enabled, even at idle the fans were annoyingly loud. If you pushed it, you’d get a quiet jet engine as they struggled to keep temps just below 95 C.

It was usually less annoying for me to just disable turbo, and only turn it on if I really needed the boost.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#235

Post by internet2000 »

codedokode wrote: post #208
bayindirh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM Thinkpads have "cap charge at n%" setting since 1999 or something, but it's not smart. You set it. It was also present in HP and Dell's business notebooks for quite some time, but again, it's not smart. Just a pre-defined percentage. Apple manages maximum charge capacity automatically depending on the way you use your computer.

> Apple manages maximum charge capacity automatically depending on the way you use your computer. Apple cannot predict where you are going to use laptop on AC power at home or whether you are going somewhere and need a full charge. So manual control is better.

That’s the weird part, they actually can. It’s supposedly one of the machine learning features, where it learns your schedule and makes daily accurate guesses of by when you’ll unplug and plug it back in.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#236

Post by walteweiss »

robertlagrant wrote: post #104
dheera wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That way it will make people aware These are all electronic devices. You can also just put big warnings in software instead of calling it 125%. It's not any different from filling up a blender, water bottle, etc. to 80% instead of 100% to avoid creating a mess. Sooner or later people will know to avoid charging batteries to 100%. > that they are reducing the battery life by overcharging Unfortunately their capitali…

> Unfortunately their capitalist asses probably want you to reduce the battery life faster and buy a new device This tactic would work great in a world with only one phone manufacturer.

Well, there is one phone manufacturer and others.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#237

Post by another2another »

matsemann wrote: post #184
bayindirh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM Thinkpads have "cap charge at n%" setting since 1999 or something, but it's not smart. You set it. It was also present in HP and Dell's business notebooks for quite some time, but again, it's not smart. Just a pre-defined percentage. Apple manages maximum charge capacity automatically depending on the way you use your computer.

I've had smart charging in other laptops for ages as well. I'm not saying Apple isn't doing good, I'm just disputing the "Apple is on another league" sentiment, when it's mostly based on a lack of knowledge of what's happening outside the Apple ecosystem.

My colleague just had to replace his HP Elitebook Notebook because the battery had bulged so much it had cracked open the case.

For this to be happening in 2023 means that some manufacturers at least, seem to be not managing this potential problem at all.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#238

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

Reason077 wrote: post #135
rekoil wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load which would otherwise result in crashes that would have made the device borderline unusable below some charge percentage. Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle, but the feature itself was amazing as it let already old phon…

> "What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load" It wasn't what Apple was doing that was the problem, it was the fact that they were initially quite secretive about it! People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation. Now days iOS tells if your battery no longer supports peak performance, which is the right thing to do. > "Yes, they s…

Maybe.

But you might overestimate technical understanding of people.

"Letting people know" comes with it's own challenges.

There are a lot of choices an OS makes without letting it's users know.

It would be quite overwhelming to communicate all. And in making choice what to communicate mistakes might be made.

Screaming disgrace is a bit exaggerated.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#239

Post by LUmBULtERA »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #117

I wish my car can self-limit to 80%. Right now I have to set a timer to remind myself to unplug. If I forget to set the timer, I'm screwed. If at the exact moment it's inconvenient to go unplug, I'm screwed. Replacing the battery costs 18000 EUR.

What car do you have? I've been used-car shopping for an EV and every one I've looked at here let me limit charge.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#240

Post by bayindirh »

internet2000 wrote: post #235
codedokode wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple manages maximum charge capacity automatically depending on the way you use your computer. Apple cannot predict where you are going to use laptop on AC power at home or whether you are going somewhere and need a full charge. So manual control is better.

That’s the weird part, they actually can. It’s supposedly one of the machine learning features, where it learns your schedule and makes daily accurate guesses of by when you’ll unplug and plug it back in.

> ... they actually can.

Yes, it does. Even my 7 years old iPhone X does it. I use some features at very specific times, and it suggests me "do you want to do X?" around the time I do that. So the models work well.

Also, the phone generally enables optimized charging if I put it to charge too early. Scheduling to finish a couple of hours before I wake.

Post reply on HN