Avoid These 3 Things to Preserve Your Laptop Battery's Health

1. Extreme heat: Heat is a very dreaded enemy of any modern battery like the Lithium Ion battery. Heat distrupts the chemistry of the battery and declines the lifespan. To solve this, make sure your PC's cooling system is very much functional. Clear dust from the cooling fan or heat sink, add cooling paste when it has dried out, replace the fan if its speed(rpm) has reduced so that excess heat will be expelled easily.

While using your laptop, try to place it on an inclined stand or a thick book since you won't always go around with a stand. This is very advisable especially when charging it because more heat is expelled during charging. Most of the heat comes from the processor (CPU).

The base of the laptop near the screen will be above on the stand or book and the palm rest will be inclined downward. This will make the air vent under the chassis free from any surface and there will be free outflow of heat.

Related: How To Monitor Your Laptop Battery Health 

2. Full-charging everytime: To make sure your system's battery last long, try to keep it below 80%. It's tested and trusted. Charging your battery up to 100% every time for any justifiable reason will degrade the battery's healty very fast. Not only that, when your system's battery is fully charged and you don't unplug it immediately it begins to generate heat beacause you are giving it unnecessary charges which is converted to heat. Also, when you charge your system's battery to 100% every time, you will run out of charge cycles quickly. In a month, try not to complete 10 charge cycles. Your system's battery will thank you. :-) 

Let's do the math: if you complete, say at most 8 cycles (maybe two in a week) in a month, in a year you'll complete around 95 cycles. In three years, your battery will go through around 290 cycles, round up to 300 cycles. So if you complete two cycles per week you'll be sure that your laptop's battery will last for at least three years. Isn't that great? 

You can also read: How to Monitor Your Computer Storage's Health

 

3. Discharging the battery to nothing: Discharging the battery completely will distrupt the battery's chemistry quickly. It is a very good practice to stop using your system when the battery is between 10% and 15%. Again, your battery will thank you. :-)

In essence, it's a good practice to leave your system's battery between 15% and 80%. It will last much longer. 

As a side note, charging your system's battery and using it at the same time will not ruin it. For me, I do this often especially when there's uncertainty in electricity supply or I want to supply more power to my system's CPU to make it clock to a higher frequency while performing heavy tasks, so as to make it perform faster. I've made a video on that on my LinkedIn page.

The only downside is that when you plug it in too often, it will go through cycles if you are not mindful and also heat will be generated if you don't unplug it when it is fully charged.

Thanks for reading.