This happened at a very inopportune time so apologies for the text being a bit bad. background: framework laptop 13 with 7640 u running fedora 40. ran great for a few months. issue: played some games on battery power. battery health went from mid 90’s to 43. i know playing on battery is bad for it but that is more what i’d expect if I took a hammer to it. what i’ve tried: rebooted, cleared upower history, removed 90% charge limit in bios then shut down and charged.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Edit: I ran it out of battery while on the bios screen then charged it to full before powering it on. Battery health is now showing 91%. I’ll see if it lasts, but I’m glad I didn’t just go out and buy a battery without troubleshooting first.
43% health?? Sounds like a faulty battery, probably still under warranty if you’ve only had it for a few months (< 1 year).
Warranty instructions: https://frame.work/warranty
A couple things to check using a quick bash script:
#!/usr/bin/env bash cd /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/ echo "Charge cycles: $(cat cycle_count)" printf '%s\0' 'Health: ' & bc <<< "scale=3; ($(cat charge_full) / $(cat charge_full_design)) * 100"That should print out the wear cycles the battery has endured and its reported capacity over design capacity. If your battery has less than 1000 cycles and the health reported from the battery is less than 80%, it might be best to contact Framework for warranty replacement as the battery is likely defective.
I feel like this is a case for framework support. They were better than your generic IT team when I interacted with them. Maybe they have a better idea of what is going wrong.
Few things:
- What is the output wattage of your charger? You need something that can keep up with the output of the battery, so Id guess 85W or higher while gaming or under heavy util.
- ensure your CPU governor didn’t get locked to ‘performance’ mode after gaming. Make sure you have power-profiles-daemon or similar installed to switch profiles.
- run the reset process for the battery from Framework. You may just have. Battery that crapped out.
65w. enough to run a 7600 and an igpu. i set it to performance but returned it to balanced after. what reset process?
Sounds like one of the cells has died; fully agree that it’s best to replace the battery (given its 7th gen, I doubt it’s still under warranty).
Alternatively, if you like tinkering with stuff just for the sake of it, you can replace the offending cell (often slightly expanded compared to the rest of them), or all 3/4 of them: in my experience, replacing only the dead one results in another one dying relatively soon after, but may still be a viable temporary solution if you’re short on money or have something of similar size lying around. Also, if you decide it sounds fun, be sure to look up how-to’s, as just disconnecting a cell will make most BMSes lock themselves + possibly burn the fuse, and you probably don’t want to play the game of “is this BMS unlockable without paying 100500 kilomoney for specialized equipment”
It is under warranty, but there’s a slightly higher capacity one I might get instead. Thanks for the explanation for how it could have actually failed.
The battery health indicator could be wrong, does it still run as long as it used to?
no, drains insanely fast. I think it’s limiting itself to 43% charge.
Sounds like maybe a faulty battery failing early, it should be under warranty I’d imagine if it has only been a few months?
You need a new battery. Don’t try to fix the problem. Replace the battery.
The battery that has been consistently working fine for several months went from 95 to 40 percent battery health in a day? I’d rather like to meet your dealer; they’ve got some good stuff.
You ran the battery at a discharge rate that was too high for it to do its chemical reaction at the rate that allows it to maintain capacity.
Rather than looking for a solution on the off chance that you know better than whoever programmed the charge controller, why not just process what sounds like an in warranty replacement for a damaged consumable part?
After cycling the battery properly the health is showing 91% and has been working well all day. It’s almost like fixing the problem was a good idea.
I’m not gonna fight you and I’m happy you’re getting the experience you want.
Consider getting a replacement while the battery is still in warranty.
