Battery Calibration or Replacement

We don't need no battery calibration… let's just buy a new one!

"What if we could get people to buy new batteries for all their devices before they're even close to dead? Cha-Ching!"

We should care about battery calibration. Hey, batteries get old and need to be replaced, right? Let's take a closer look, because that battery in my cell phone is not available at my local hardware store and it's not 3 bucks!

Here are some simple ideas to get you started practicing battery calibration with all of your modern rechargeable devices.

There's a circuit in modern rechargeable batteries that tells the device how much capacity remains. It assumes I completely discharge the battery before plugging it in again. If I only discharge the battery part way and then charge it up (like I do when my laptop is plugged into AC all day), then the circuit gets confused about where the top and bottom of the battery capacity "container" is. There may be 35% capacity remaining, but the circuit thinks there's only 5% and the device shuts down – well, in most cases, that circuit can be reset.

Each battery is a little different, so I'd encourage you to Google your cell phone… laptop… cordless drill… battery and use the term "calibration" in the search string. Find an article that sounds just right? Read the comments after each article to see what happened when people applied the practices the author recommends.

Essentially, what I've found is that periodically I need to completely charge up (100%) and then as nearly as I can, completely discharge without interruption, and then charge up the battery to 100% again. Granted, technology is going to change and the two devices I use the most are my laptop and smart phone. Both have Li Ion rechargeable batteries. For the laptop, there are some Power settings that need to be changed in order to get a more complete discharge. Here's a video produced by atbatt.com describing how to configure a Battery Discharge power plan to use when you calibrate your battery.

Create a Battery Discharge Power Plan in Windows 7

I've started testing apps for my Droid smart phone that helps manage my battery usage and so far have found one that claims to recalibrate my phone battery without having to root the phone and enter a bunch of command lines. I'm ok with command line work, but most people prefer a screen based interface.

Battery HD (for Droid Smart Phones)

There are tons of videos and articles out there, so if you can avoid spending $130 for a laptop battery for another year, is it worth a little research?