A laptop battery is a consumable item that can run out of charge at any time. Laptops by design must be plugged in to operate, and after time the battery may decrease in performance and fail to hold a charge for very long. This can be frustrating when you need to make essential presentations or work on the go.
However, rather than buying a new battery, learn how to recondition laptop battery. You will be able to make your current one last longer and perform better. This will also save your money and make your laptop spend a little more time with its battery.
The thing is, there are numerous methods to recondition a laptop battery, but the truth is that there are only a few that work. Finding a suitable method for you is crucial. Considering this, I will help you recondition your laptop battery with the proper methods. So, keep reading to find out what you can achieve today.
Table of Contents
In what conditions can I recondition my laptop battery?
Before you go for the methods to recondition your laptop battery, you must know which conditions you can go for such a thing. Please have a look! This will give you a general idea about whether you should do those things with your laptop that you are going to do or not?
- When the required components are broken
- When the required components required to recharge the battery are missing
- When there is a defect in the battery
- When you get to know that there is no issue with the cells of the battery and they don’t need to replace
Methods for Reconditioning a Laptop’s Battery:
Since you consider reconditioning necessary, essential, and money-saving, you can use the following methods to put the dead battery laptop that will be ready again to charge and give you what you deserve.
First Method—Freezing:
One time, for example, I saw a movie where someone’s phone was about to die (someone like me because my phone is always about to die), so he stuck it in a snowbank. Apparently, the cold made the battery last longer! But you can freeze your laptop’s battery and actually get a bit more battery life out of it! It’s kind of crazy thinking about what you could do with this knowledge. So, let me tell you how you can recondition your laptop battery by this method.
Plug out the battery–Turn off your laptop, plug out the power cord of the adapter, turn it upside down and remove the battery from its case.
Place the battery in a sealed bag–Take this battery and place it in a plastic or sealed Ziploc bag.
Place the bag into the refrigerator—Now, take that Sealed bag and put that inside your freezer for almost 12 hours. It would be suitable for placing it right there for more than 12 hours, but I won’t recommend it for more than 24 hours.
Let the battery Warm–After this time, open the refrigerator and take your battery out. Unpack it from the bag and let it warm a little according to the Room temperature. When it gets a little warm, use a towel or a piece of cloth to clean it thoroughly.
Please charge the battery completely—Bring your laptop and put the battery again inside it. After that, plug in your laptop and let the battery charge.
Drain out all the battery—If the battery is charged fully for that time, unplug your laptop and use it for different purposes, you seem fit. You need to drain all its battery and until it doesn’t happen, keep using it.
Once you have done all this, you are pretty familiar with what you’re going to do next. Just be a good guy and repeat steps 5 and 6 at least 5 times. This will include charging your battery at its full capacity and then discharging it again. You should keep doing this until your battery starts leaking acid. This will give a bump in the battery life of your laptop until it dies.
Please Note:
Remember that this freezing method can only work with NiCad or NiMH batteries but not with Lithium batteries. Because if you apply this to a lithium battery, it will make it even worse than before. The bad luck is that there is no method through which you can recover the lithium batteries. Usually, they are meant to be thrown away when they fail. Lithium-Ion batteries may offer longer life, but after time, they will begin degrading in performance as well.
However, the possible thing that you can do is increase the battery’s life. Don’t you leave me here! Let’s fall for the other method in order to understand that.
Second Method—Cooling the Laptop:
Most probably, you will think that your laptop battery is draining faster than average. The reason could be that the battery is resulting in a shorter lifespan now. This will also make you think that it is time for a new battery that can cost you some bucks.
But other than this, there could be a problem with your laptop which is basically its heating issues. When your laptop performs faster and starts heating up because you don’t have placed it in an excellent environment or you don’t have any cooling pad working beneath it, it will consume the battery faster. So, in case you got a lithium-ion battery, you can increase its lifespan by making sure that your laptop stays cool when it performs out of the box on some heavy-duty applications.
You can buy a cooling pad that will eventually not cost you much and easily tackle this problem. This is another suitable method of laptop battery reconditioning or increasing its life cycle.
Third Method—Recalibrating Your Laptop’s Battery:
This is another process that may benefit you by increasing the lifespan of your battery and holding it a little longer. Most of the new batteries don’t require this, but only in case, your one is dying earlier.
Recalibration of a laptop battery solves the problem of a laptop saying that your battery is damaged, even when you have just charged it. This is because the battery meter on the laptop is not accurate. To recalibrate your battery, you need to complete an entire discharge cycle. If your laptop’s battery never charges to 100% or if the interface says you have 35 minutes of charge remaining. Still, your computer dies either much sooner or much later; it may be time for calibration.
Recalibrating a battery does not recover all of the capacity of the cells. In fact, it recovers only about 10-20%. But this is enough to improve your laptop battery life cycle and make it last longer.
Recalibration of a laptop battery can be done using different laptop battery calibrating software. However, I would recommend using Sony in case you want to recalibrate your laptop battery through software.
But not only the software method, but you can also do this manually. Here is how you’re gonna do so.
- First, you need to charge your laptop to 100 percent or whatever the maximum charging capacity it can achieve. Now, leave your laptop for at least 3 hours so that it may cool down.
- After completing the total charge, start using your laptop and drain out all of its battery. You must make sure that the display stays on, and you should keep using it until it dies by itself.
- Now, keep the laptop turned off for at least 4 to 5 hours. Have some coffee or take care of some other chores if you are free.
- Come back to your laptop after that while. Please turn it on, plug it in and let it charge till 100 percent. This will recalibrate your laptop’s battery and will start giving you the actual reading of the battery you have in your laptop.
Remember! Your laptop battery is a consumable item. If you continue to use it, it will result in shorter battery life. It is better to calibrate your laptop once a month or after a small amount of usage as a precautionary measure.
Fourth Method—Removing the Laptop’s Battery When Plugged in:
You may have noticed that your laptop or computer is a little slower than normal. What has happened is that the battery’s charge is lowering. If you have a removable battery, you can try to remove the battery during the times you have it plugged into the wall. Be aware some computers aren’t constructed so as to be operable with their batteries removed. Still, if your computer runs appropriately without its battery, this might help you out!
Removing the battery while the laptop is plugged in and working on direct electricity can help the battery increase its life. The chemical reactions won’t stop happening inside the battery, whether it is plugged in the laptop or removed. When you have removed the battery from the laptop and the laptop is still working without it, it will give the battery time to cool down. So, when you plug in again, it will be cool and worthy enough to hold for a little longer.
But be sure that you are living in the environment or inside an area where there are no issues with the electricity load shedding or breakdowns. Because this will happen during the described process, you may lose important data. However, according to some people, this method is a little bit annoying and time-consuming. Moreover, it is a risky one. Therefore, it is on you whether you do it or not.
Still, want to know how to recondition your laptop’s battery? Please have a look! Here is the last step given below.
Fifth Method—Unplug Your Laptop at Full Battery:
My last tip for keeping your computer running at peak performance is to simply let the battery charge until it hits 100%, then unplug the computer. Early in its lifespan, when you know you’re not going to be using the computer for a while, i.e., when you’ve got things backed up, feel free to let it burn out before plugging it in again.
However, suppose your Lithium-Ion battery is relatively new or has been subjected to this method many times already. In that case, you may notice that your device does not perform quite as well in the future compared with when it was brand new out-of-the-box.
I will suggest only dropping the level down to about 45% before charging back up to 75%. You can then unplug your computer and lock it away for a while without damaging the battery too much without having anything important backing up during that period; otherwise, essential operations will get interrupted accidentally because of “low power” errors.
The thing is, this method is still a little handy, and you have to remember to charge your laptop when the battery reaches the described level and plug it out when it reaches almost 75 to 85 percent. This will increase the life of your lithium battery and make it last longer. No doubt, you are going to do this.
How many types of laptop batteries are there?
There are three main types of laptop batteries.
Nickel-cadmium (NiCad):
The older ones are Nickel-cadmium (NiCad) batteries, which are considered inferior to the others because they are less efficient. Nickel-cadmium batteries are a type of rechargeable battery that uses nickel and cadmium with a small amount of cobalt. They were one of the first rechargeable batteries and were used to power many electronics between the 1970s and the 1990s. A NiCad charger can recharge a single NiCad battery in just a few hours.
However, they can’t be left charging for very long as this is a quick way to ruin the battery. Even though they are no longer as popular as decades ago, you can still find NiCad batteries in electronics today.
They are used in cordless phones, electric tools, and many portable devices. NiCad batteries were replaced by Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) and Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. For the most part, they outperform NiCad batteries. NiCad is still a good option for people on a budget. They are considered a “hybrid” cell, which means that if you don’t discharge your battery fully, you can recharge it up to 1000 times.
Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH):
The most common batteries are Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH), which are the more efficient out of the three. NiMH batteries are a newer generation of rechargeable batteries similar to cellular telephones and laptop computers. They are designed as replacements for the older Nickel-Cadmium (NiCad) batteries that can also be recharged.
NiMH batteries contain no cadmium and are considered environmentally friendlier than Li-Ion and NiCad batteries. NiMH batteries typically have a longer life than NiCad and provide more than 2,000 charge and discharge cycles. They can also be charged to a higher capacity than NiCD and Li-Ion batteries.
The most significant difference from NiCad is that NiMH batteries don’t have a “memory effect,” which results in their ability to go from a completely drained state to a fully charged state. In addition, they can be charged or discharged at any time without having to be charged fully before use.
Lithium-ion (Li-ion):
The most high-tech batteries, Lithium-ion (Li-ion), are the most efficient. They also have fewer memory effects, which means they can be charged to total capacity anytime. Li-ion batteries are rechargeable electrochemical cells that use an intercalated lithium compound as an electrode material. Like other secondary batteries, they use an electrolyte, typically a lithium salt, in an organic solvent.
Lithium-ion batteries are among the highest energy-density batteries currently available, with specific energies (energy per unit mass) of more than twice that of lead-acid batteries. Li-ion batteries are also far less susceptible than lead-acid batteries to the problems associated with deep discharging.
Li-ion batteries are now used in many kinds of electric vehicles, power tools, laptops, and other applications replacing lead-acid batteries. This battery technology is expected to revolutionize electric transport.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Can I recondition lithium-Ion batteries?
Not really. Reconditioning lithium-ion batteries is not possible. They are non-rechargeable batteries, and they don’t have a memory so that they can be replaced at any time. So, if you consume an electronic device with a lithium-ion battery, you need to replace it.
Don’t charge batteries before they are fully drained, you’ll shorten their life even further. If you buy a new battery and the device still doesn’t work, and it seems like the problem is not with the battery, something is wrong.
Is it okay to purchase a new laptop battery or recondition the old one?
It may seem like a brand-new battery will work as well as a reconditioned one. Still, you’ll be surprised at how the reconditioned battery will outperform a new one!
Sometimes, manufacturers place a lot of restrictions on the batteries, which will cause the battery to stop working after a certain number of charges, which is when reconditioning becomes necessary.
It’s a cheap and easy way to get a battery that will last you for a long time. Because of the numerous restrictions that manufacturers place on new batteries, it’s worth considering reconditioning them because if you don’t, you risk having to pay for a new one.
If you’re thinking about a new laptop battery, prepare to spend a lot of money on a new one… But if you don’t want to spend much at all, try to find a reconditioned laptop battery. Check out this blog post if you would like to know more about reconditioning a laptop battery.
How much does it cost for a laptop battery?
The price of a new laptop battery will vary between manufacturers, models, capacity levels, and whether it is an original or aftermarket battery. You can expect to pay between $100 and $200 for an OEM battery. OEM batteries are the batteries that come with your computer when you buy them. They are known as original manufacturer batteries.
They are usually priced higher because the vendor must pay the manufacturer to have them produce the batteries. Also, because the battery is considered a consumable item, it can be swapped out at any time for a new one.
What is Laptop battery Reconditioning software?
The laptop battery reconditioning software is actually an application that makes it very easy to restore your laptop’s battery to its factory capacity. One application you can use is Battery Optimizer Pro. It scans the system to detect the battery problem and fixes it. It is the easiest way to restore your laptop battery.
How to take care of a laptop battery for long working hours?
You can do a few things to ensure that your laptop battery lasts as long as possible. First, the temperature can affect your battery’s ability to charge, so make sure your battery is not overheated or freezing cold. Also, make sure your battery is properly seated on your laptop and secure. If your laptop is old and tends to overheat, consider getting a cooling pad or a laptop cooler to make using your laptop more enjoyable.
Final Thoughts
The best way to recondition a laptop battery is to use a combination of the different methods. This will ensure that you get the most extended life from your laptop battery when reconditioning it, which will allow you to use it for many years to come. I hope you have found this article helpful! I have tried my best to provide you with a comprehensive list of tips and tricks on how to recondition a laptop battery.
Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions. If you found this article helpful, please share it with your friends and family! If you have some other tips on reconditioning a laptop battery, please feel free to comment below.