Short battery time on HP Zbook 14U G6

[BengtR]

I should have checked this before my warranty expired but at least I can check if this is a driver issue and not the battery. Or buy a new battery.

As recommended I have used the battery report to check my battery. What a fantastic feature! I wasn't aware of it.

This is the history of my battery:

2020-08 - new. 49 521 mW

This goes down slowly to 44 000 mW until 2021-04 when it suddenly dropps down to 40 000 mW

From there it goes down slowly to 37 000 mW until 2021-12 when it suddenly dropps down to 27 489 mWh

That value is then constant for all remaining report days until today 2023-12-21.

Because of the sudden dropps and that the battery capacity has been constant for so long I suspect that the battery is not used at its full capacity. Is this something I can check? I have done some BIOS upgrades which may be related to those dropps. I think I'm using the latest BIOS now (HP R70) but there is an issue in Device Manager about that. It says I need to reboot for the BIOS to be usable but reboot does not help.

[Huffer]

It's not a driver or the BIOS. The battery is over 3 years old and needs to be replaced. It is not uncommon for batteries near the end of life to experience sudden drastic decreases in power capacity. 

[BengtR]

What you are missing is that the battery has done such drops early in its lifetime AND that it is now not losing any of its capacity which is highly abnormal. HP jag also released fixes for battery life time both as separate drivers and BIOS updates and I'm not sure if they are installed and used as they should.

[Huffer]

Im not missing anything I was just telling you it would not be unusual for that last bit of power capacity to very suddenly disappear and the battery not be functional which is why you need to replace it. Not sure why people fight coming to the conclusion that they need a new laptop battery. It's like brakes or tires on your car. Not fun to replace but ordinary regular maintenance. 

[BengtR]

Nothing in what you say can explain the strange behavior that the battery capacity have locked at a low level after a not very long time. If it was normal the battery capacity should keep lowering with time.

This is the reason I suspect its something wrong with the battery manager.

[Huffer]

Definitely not impossible but there is an old saying among doctors: "if you hear hoofbeats think horses not zebras". In almost all battery issues, the culprit is the battery. 

[BengtR]

I think you're right. I did a battery check within the B IOS and for this model there is a report of each cell in the battery. And cell 1 is dead.

This doesn't explain that the battery reporter thinks that the battery capacity is constant. I supose the battery manager can't handle the situation with a dead cell very well but now I at least know that the battery needs replacing.

Thanks for pushing me in the right direction!

[BengtR]

I opened the computer to check the battery. Obviously this battery has only three cells so the information about one cell is dead is wrong. It's just not existing. So this locking on 27 489 mWh (two years by now) is still rather suspicious but I think it can be so simple that the battery monitor has a range and this is the lowest. Somewhat weird but it is is not very meaningsful to measure capacity lower than 50% so it is possible.

What is bad is that the battery dropped to this level in only one and half year since purchace.

Today I switched battery setting in BIOS to "maximize batery capacity". I normally use settings that improve lifetime for battery but in the current situation I better just try to squeeze out the last of this battery, if any! It made a huge change! (At least in what is reported in numbers). Full charge capacity changed from 34373 to 41337 mAh. Full charge should just not change, it should always be the same but if preserving battery lifetime battery is not fully charged.

I hope that this is just not numbers but real data. I will check again in a few days to see what the battery history says. I trust that more to give real usage data.

[BengtR]

I think it is time to do a final report of this. It's now about two weeks since I updated the BIOS and changed the setting to "maximize battery capacity".

Last week the reported battery capacity has slowly been creaping up and is now 42 608 kWh. A huge improvement from the crippled level of 27 489 that I was stuck with for two years. A drop from the initial 50 012 kWh to 42 608 kW isn't bad at all for a three and a half year old battery. Feels very good wo now have a better working laptop.

So in this special case there obviously was an unexpected solution to the problem. Make sure you get the BIOS updated and do fidle with the battery settings in the BIOS if it behaves unexpected. Windows Battery report is your friend!