How-To: calibrate your battery

[chylife]

You don't do the battery calibration on Lithium-Ion and Lithium Polymer batteries. It won't help better, it is unnecessary.

[dd4005]

Originally Posted by chylife

You don't do the battery calibration on Lithium-Ion and Lithium Polymer batteries. It won't help better, it is unnecessary.

It does help. It doesn't make any difference what type of battery you've got, it helps to calibrate the battery monitor's idea of how much you've got remaining. It doesn't do anything to help the battery live longer - only the perception that it's living longer.

NiMH and NiCad batteries on the other hand, they do benefit from a full to empty discharge. With them, it's the actual battery that will perform better.

[SliceBurgSlim]

Originally Posted by Alex Smth

Do NOT charge or plug in cable until your battery signals warning LOW sign. Then charge it to full.

Actually from what I've read, its not good to let the battery drain completely before Charging. Its better to charge around 40%-30%

Discharging your LIB fully (or less than 2.4 Volt per cell) is bad for the battery. Every time you do that, it can be said that small part of your battery (some cells) dies (they forever lose their charge). Do not store your batteries depleted, there's a high chance they will die completely or will become very "weak".

[jah]

Originally Posted by Alex Smth

Try this:
Always charge your battery to full and THEN ONLY pluck the cable out, i.e. you must full charge you machine before you remove your cables.
Do NOT charge or plug in cable until your battery signals warning LOW sign. Then charge it to full.
If you use your computer always on cables, try to use it on battery 3 days until it empties, and then recharge it to full.
Keep you battery clean.
NOTE: It cannot be calibrated more than to it's factory setting.

3 days? hah!

[alphawave7]

Originally Posted by SliceBurgSlim

Actually from what I've read, its not good to let the battery drain completely before Charging. Its better to charge around 40%-30%

Discharging your LIB fully (or less than 2.4 Volt per cell) is bad for the battery. Every time you do that, it can be said that small part of your battery (some cells) dies (they forever lose their charge). Do not store your batteries depleted, there's a high chance they will die completely or will become very "weak".

Normal usage will not drain any Li-poly cell into this danger zone...only storing a dead cell for lengthy times, or intentionally draining/shorting the cell (or simple age/exhaustion) will get the cell into this danger zone. There is nothing wrong whatsoever with allowing your phone to shut itself off before a recharge...the charge algorithm shuts off the cell well before it reaches the danger zone, as a specification of the cell technology.

[ellesshoo]

Originally Posted by alphawave7

Normal usage will not drain any Li-poly cell into this danger zone...only storing a dead cell for lengthy times, or intentionally draining/shorting the cell (or simple age/exhaustion) will get the cell into this danger zone. There is nothing wrong whatsoever with allowing your phone to shut itself off before a recharge...the charge algorithm shuts off the cell well before it reaches the danger zone, as a specification of the cell technology.

This is correct, there is a monitor that will shut the thing down before you drop below the threshold voltage per cell. There is nothing wrong with letting your battery drain to shutoff. Just don't do it and then store it like that for a long time.

[Fury]

No one has mentioned overcharging,
as a (bad) habit of mine, i like to drop my N1 on to the dock every time i get back to my room.

Im assuming this kills the battery aswell, as with laptops?

[dd4005]

Originally Posted by Fury

No one has mentioned overcharging,
as a (bad) habit of mine, i like to drop my N1 on to the dock every time i get back to my room.

Im assuming this kills the battery aswell, as with laptops?

I'm guilty of this too. My phone will sometimes stay in it's dock for 3 days. When I take it out of the dock (after a whole day of being in) I'll find that although I earlier saw it had reached 100%, it later starts going down. It's usually about 97% when I take it out of dock.

[tyler.durden]

The Li ion batteries in any consumer product such as a phone, PDA, mp3 player, laptop computer, digital camera, etc., have a circuit inside the battery package that controls charge and discharge of the actual Li ion cell. The circuit prevents overcharging and deep discharging, therefore there is no harm in running the phone until it shuts itself off and there is no harm in connecting it to the charger before the phone has shut itself off due to a low battery charge.

All this nonsense about overcharging and deep discharging that keeps getting repeated ad nauseum applies to the Li ion cells to which you have no direct access to in a consumer device. People who build model airplanes and robots buy Li ion cells to power them and must carefully monitor charging and especially discharging of the batteries in order to maximize their life and minimize the risk of a crash due to premature cell failure. They buy the raw Li ion cells without a built in protective circuit because they want to be able to charge and especially to discharge the cells very quickly, and a protective circuit built into the cell would prevent that.

[keyplyr]

Originally Posted by jah

I've heard that this is unnecessary and can damage the battery. Are we sure this is a good idea?

Originally Posted by SliceBurgSlim

Ive heard that draining li-ion batteries down to zero can be bad for the battery over time...

Originally Posted by SliceBurgSlim

Discharging your LIB fully (or less than 2.4 Volt per cell) is bad for the battery. Every time you do that, it can be said that small part of your battery (some cells) dies (they forever lose their charge). Do not store your batteries depleted, there's a high chance they will die completely or will become very "weak".

Exactly

When I asked him last week, my student (who developed the Snapdragon processor at Qualcomm) thinks it is a very bad idea to completely drain the N1 battery in a vain attempt to "calibrate" the battery. He says there is no such thing as "calibrating" the battery and thinks these people are just attempting to sound knowledgeable when in fact they don't understand what they are talking about.