Leaving your devices plugged in to an outlet in 2019

[7412]

Is it still bad for battery longevity or have things improved since? Should I avoid leaving my laptop plugged-in all night?

[Eigenvektor]

Batteries don't like being charged constantly. That's a basic physical property and isn't going to change. Battery controllers have improved to avoid charging cells that are already at capacity etc. so charging when your laptop is at half capacity isn't as bad as it used to be, but keeping it attached to the outlet constantly still isn't a good thing to do (constantly discharging and charging is also wearing it down... so pick your poison )

[TechyBen]

I have an app on my Phone tro track and help charge resonably and sensibly.

On the laptop though, I'm real bad and use them as desktop replacements, the new laptops don't have removable batteries, so I assume if the charge controller ain't keeping them safe...  (Older laptops had removable batteries, so I could keep them always at 70% etc and safe).

[Alex Atkin UK]

Modern devices will not charge once they have reached 100%, often they will refuse even if you unplug and plug back in at 95%, to avoid over-charging.

Strictly speaking charging the battery to 100% then not using it for a long time is not great for the battery.  Many laptops come with bloatware software that lets you define how much to charge the battery to preserve its life.  I keep my gaming laptop at 50%, as I rarely use it on battery anyway as it runs at such a lower performance profile off battery.

 

Although the catch is it forgets this if you power cycle the PSU and will resume charging to 100%, so it may actually be MORE healthy to leave the PSU on if you are using one of these modes.

[Kisai]

34 minutes ago, 7412 said:

Is it still bad for battery longevity or have things improved since? Should I avoid leaving my laptop plugged-in all night?

Devices like cell phones and laptops are fine being left plugged in provided that:

 

1) You're using the OEM charger, and not a counterfeit/third party that provides insufficient wattage or doesn't work correctly (the reason for many cell phone battery explosions is a combination of bad battery and bad charging)

 

2) The laptop has the charging set to "adaptive" or some other trainable mode. When it's in these modes it learns what your usage pattern is and tries to maximize the life of the battery. This will typically be better than any manual effort of trying to preserve the battery life.

 

If you're using aftermarket chargers, then there's no guarantee that the voltage or wattage is correct (as an example, both Dell and HP's power bricks are IDENTICAL other than the barrel connector on the end, right down to the voltage +/- half a volt.) Since HP and Dell use the same bricks, and they only differ by a serial signal sent when it connects, the LAPTOP will not charge the battery if the power brick is doesn't ID itself as an authentic item.

 

Now occasionally, docking stations will just plain screw up and stop passing that signal to the laptop, and as such the laptop will operate in a degraded mode where the battery doesn't charge and the CPU/GPU operate at the lowest possible frequency to avoid damage. 

 

"Thin and light"/Ultrabook style laptops have the worst battery life, often only lasting slightly more than one year, even if you just leave it unplugged for a few months. Anything thicker (eg 15" and 17" laptops with discrete GPU's) will last much longer as there's more battery capacity to cycle through.

 

With that said, the only manual effort you can do to reduce the wear on the battery is to tell the laptop to use a more aggressive power management scheme (eg to sleep after 5 minutes on battery, or hibernate after 30 minutes) rather than to try and use the laptop like it were a desktop while it's on battery. Many users at the office have the stock system image from work which is tuned to a desktop settings, so the sleep/suspend settings are set in excess of an hour or even turned off so they won't go to sleep during presentations.

 

 

[Tamesh16]

3 minutes ago, Kisai said:

laptops are fine being left plugged in provided that

i dont really know about that too much, i had my laptop plugged in a normal amount, and only when i would game

and my battery still swole, maybe i got a defective battery, i cant be sure

3 minutes ago, Kisai said:

charging set to "adaptive"

i am unsure what this is,

but my laptop is listed in my signature so if i can do it let me know, cause i want to avoid it swelling again

[7412]

36 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

but keeping it attached to the outlet constantly still isn't a good thing to do

When I'm home, I'm using it as a desktop replacement, so I have to keep it plugged in to power keyboard, mouse and external monitor. Is that bad for battery life?

[Kisai]

1 minute ago, Tamesh16 said:

i dont really know about that too much, i had my laptop plugged in a normal amount, and only when i would game

and my battery still swole, maybe i got a defective battery, i cant be sure

i am unsure what this is,

but my laptop is listed in my signature so if i can do it let me know, cause i want to avoid it swelling again

Dell's business laptops (Latitude, Precision) have an entire BIOS page dedicated to battery settings. You can also install the Dell Power Manager tool to change it without going into the BIOS.

 

If you have it set to Advanced Charge, it's intended to be used for a work pattern (eg mon-fri, 9am-6pm) so it will only charge the battery to full during those times, outside those times, it will only charge the battery if it gets to something like 20%.

 

 

The default setting is usually Adaptive. This is what it should be set to normally.

 

[Tamesh16]

5 minutes ago, Kisai said:

The default setting is usually Adaptive. This is what it should be set to normally.

this is quite informative, thank you, 

i checked the software, and my laptop refreshed Alienware R3 isnt listed as compatible, havent seen any alienware as a matter of fact 

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

Lithium-based batteries degrade over time.  If you keep them at full or low charge this process happens much faster.  Ideally you'd never go beyond 20 and 80%, with 40-60% being perfect for longevity (which is why new phones and laptops usually come with half a charge when you buy them).

 

If you need to use the battery a lot, of course you'll need to fully charge it on a regular basis.  There's no way around that. 

However if you only use it at your desk, try to have it in that 40-60% area when shutting it down for the night and only plug it back in when you boot it in the morning.  Same story if you're going on holiday or away for the weekend, try to have it at about half a charge when you shut it down.

 

 

[Kisai]

2 minutes ago, Tamesh16 said:

this is quite informative, thank you, 

i checked the software, and my laptop refreshed Alienware R3 isnt listed as compatible, havent seen any alienware as a matter of fact 

Punch in your service tag into the support section of Dell's site and see if the "Dell Power Manager" "Dell Command | Power Manager" or "Alienware Command Center" are listed.  The Alienware Command Center feature is apparently called "Alien Fusion"

[Tamesh16]

54 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Alienware Command Center

i have this already, however i dont think it has changes to charge settings like which you previously mentioned

[PianoPlayer88Key]

With my laptop,  I pretty much have no choice but to leave it plugged in at least when it's unattended.  I haven't run an actual stress test recently (if ever), but I'd bet that an 82 WH battery, even when new, wouldn't last very long when simultaneously running Prime95 on an i7-6700K at 4.5 GHz and FurMark on a GTX 970M.  (That is, if my laptop's cooling could keep up.  I can run Cinebench at 4.5 and maybe 4.6, and have barely passed 4.7 once or twice (with some finessing with the voltage, running on a cooler day, and running it right after powering the laptop on after it had been off for several hours, during which I had cleaned the dust out), but P95 would be a bit tougher.)

 

Even under lighter loads, like idle at the desktop (with a few VMs idling and Chrome tabs, etc. idling - for example about 30 to 40 GB RAM in use ... I doubt my laptop would last more than 2 or maybe 3 hours before it shuts down due to critical battery.  I usually prefer to leave it on all the time, it takes a while to restore my session after a reboot, among other things.

 

And with the battery I had until a week or 2 ago, it had pretty much NO battery life left.   HWInfo64 showed 0 mWh, and if I unplugged the cord from the back of the laptop while it was running, the laptop would have powered off even WHILE the plastic parts were still in physical contact.   (In December I will have had the laptop 4 years.  For now, my planned time for replacement is about when DDR6 or DDR7 comes out.)