My HP 15-ab Pavilion is in need of a new battery again -- is there a reliable 3rd party source?

[gkline]

EDIT:

It appears that HP is no longer manufacturing these removable batteries, or directly sourcing a 3rd party to produce them. When you go online to hunt for them, you'll find 3 different ones:

• HP OEM labeled batteries -- not being sold on Amazon from my searches, but are on eBay. These are the cells having the "HP" logo. I think they may be New Old Stock.
• Generic labeled batteries -- these look just like the original, but lack the HP logo. Milliamp hours can vary, e.g. 2200, 2400, 2600 mAh. In my experience, these generally last about a year or less.
• 3rd party branded batteries -- these have a brand label affixed and may claim even higher specs than original. But they are not made by HP and from reviews I've seen, they don't last longer than the generics.

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The original HP brand battery for my HP Pavilion 15-ab became unusable after about 3 years... which is about normal. The HP brand OEM battery is rather costly and there are so many 3rd parties supply aftermarket batteries... so I went with an aftermarket battery, from Amazon. And that one lasted about 1.5 years. When I went  to repurchase, that particular seller was defunct. So I spent about an hour or two looking over the myriad of other battery offerings. I found what looked to be a good battery and bought it (less than $20). Well, it lasted about 11 months. The seller had a guarantee, and sent me a replacement. All was fine... until about 10 months later--failed again. We're talking about 50 mins of runtime and the computer becoming confused with the remaining charge level... to then suddenly find the battery shuts down without warning.

TLDR; This is an old laptop, at a point where even HP stopped selling replacement batteries. Does anyone here know of a good, reliable source? Thanks!

[gkline · Accepted solution]

TLDR; try to avoid buying 3rd party HP battery packs. In my experience having had 3 of them, from two different sellers, that they do not last more than 1 year, and barely that (one of mine failed at 11 months, the other was 10 months). Even if an OEM HP battery pack is a few years old (having sat in a warehouse since manufactured), it's far better than a non-OEM replacement.  If you check on Amazon, you'll find even batteries with mostly positive reviews will show negatives where people came back to indicate the battery didn't last. A lot of people don't bother to do this.

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So, I've confirmed that HP is no longer making a number of removable laptop batter packs that were originally produced 6 years ago (now considered EOL). The whole HP Pavilion 15-ab series faces this issue.

However, some OEM HP battery packs were produced in sufficient quantity to still be available via 3rd parties. I was able to locate the KI04 type battery pack from a trusted seller on eBay. It was confirmed with the official HP logo printed upon it. Seller had confirmed these were made about 3 years ago. The cost was pretty much in line with the no-name 3rd party KI04 replacement battery packs. 

When you get a replacement battery pack installed, boot up into the F2 diagnostic menu. Select Components -> Power -> Battery, and run a test. After that completes click on Details. It'll show a lot of useful info about the battery, such as age (how long since it was manufactured), number of charge cycles, rated mAh, charged mAh, percentage charge capability, rated voltage, tested voltage, and the individual mAh charge levels of each internal battery cell. This way you can confirm that your replacement battery is indeed new and performing to spec.

Here's the readout on my previous dying 3rd party no-name battery pack:

Despite it showing charge capacity of 51%, my laptop would be unable to run more than a few minutes on the battery pack before suffering an abnormal shutdown. The glaring note here is that one battery cell is appreciably lower than the others, by about 800 mAh. This one failing cell ends up compromising the entire pack. The firmware doesn't seem to tolerate it well. So it also fails to communicate properly with Windows... which is why it doesn't let Windows know that battery level is critical.

The battery I received appears genuine and is nicely performing to spec, in fact even a little higher in voltage and total mAh.

You can see the manufacture date is late 2017. Despite it having been in storage for 3 years, it is unused and should perform well for the next 2~3 years.