I am wondering if there is something wrong with my battery of my librem 13.
I bought it a couple of weeks ago, so its actually new. In comparison with my old lenovo it takes three times more to recharge the battery. My lenovo need roughly 90min and my librem needs almost 5 hours to charge from 0% to 100%.
Is this normal and intended for a longer battery life? Five hours is quite annoying. How long does it take to charge your librem?
I have a generalized battery observation to tell you, but not a specific for your question.
A new healthy battery has more active surface area for the charging to go onto. As a battery ages and the surface area that the charge was supposed to go on gets altered where it cant take a charge, it will charge quicker because it doesn’t have to fill (can’t fill) the damaged area.
A battery full meter is usually a sensor showing how few ampres are going into the battery. An old laptop battery with a short useful time charges quick, and a battery that allows you long unplugged computing time takes long to charge.
Mutually exclusive from all I said so far, their are two specifications that you can look at to see if you can explain the reason for the discrepancy. One is the milliamp hour capacity of the battery (mAh), and the other is the ampere rating of the charging transformer chord (A).
If one battery has 25% higher mAh capacity, it will take 25% longer to charge with the same charging chord.
If the amp rating of the charging transformer on the chord is 33% higher and the mAh ratings are the same, the higher rated transformer will charge in 66% of the time that the other one takes.
Both power supply are almost the same:
Lenovo: 20V with 3.25A Output
Librem: 19V with 3.42A Output.
The original capacity of both are the similar:
Lenovo: 49.28Wh
Librem: 44.696Wh
The Lenovo has 75% of its capacity left: 35Wh fully charged.
According to this specs I expect the librem to charge in about 120min, but it takes more than double.
I also tried to use another power supply with the same specs but no change.
So maybe the long time is intendes by design.
Those are almost identical wattage (V*A) so they are equal.
Also nearly identical.
One of the things that started long ago with some iDevice was that it cost them very little to pre-charge the device but the aesthetic gains of using it the moment it came out of the gift box was tremendous in marketing terms.
Typically when I read the fine print about brand new rechargeable batteries, they want them to charge the first time for over 24 hours, and they say things like it won’t be at its fullest potential until it cycles full to dead a few times.
It could just be old-school that Librem didn’t do the battery prep before shipping it.
If there is fast charging for laptop’s battery like some smart phone have, I would avoid or disable it. Not worth it, too many issues. Standard charging is safer and stable in the long run.
I think that’s true for most (if not all) batteries. Slower charging is better charging and healthier for the battery.