Question Did I damage the battery in any way?

[mesmerized]

Hello there,

I got a new laptop at the end of June but for a few reasons (irrelevant, so won't bore you with the details) I didn't turn it on until a few days ago. So basically it was sitting in a box waiting to be turned on for quite a while. When I finally got to turn it on, the battery was drained, so I had to get it charged first. Now... I'm wondering, did leaving it for such a long time without turning it on and letting the battery go down to 0 could have an impact on the battery's capacity? As far as I know, if we won't to leave a device unused for a while, it's recommended to charge its battery to 50%.

Would be great to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

I'm wondering, did leaving it for such a long time without turning it on and letting the battery go down to 0 could have an impact on the battery's capacity?

definitely not.
many such devices sit in warehouses and/or on store shelves for many months, some even up to years at a time with no such degradation.

are you suffering any noticeable issue with the system or just paranoid for some reason?

 

[Odelia_S]

I had a laptop sitting unused for over a year and the battery was dead when I finally got to it. But it’s working just fine now.
I’ve read that leaving a laptop discharged for a long time can damage the battery but that didn’t happen in my case. So, maybe there’s a risk but it seems pretty small.

 

[Glahe]

Hello there,

I got a new laptop at the end of June but for a few reasons (irrelevant, so won't bore you with the details) I didn't turn it on until a few days ago. So basically it was sitting in a box waiting to be turned on for quite a while. When I finally got to turn it on, the battery was drained, so I had to get it charged first. Now... I'm wondering, did leaving it for such a long time without turning it on and letting the battery go down to 0 could have an impact on the battery's capacity? As far as I know, if we won't to leave a device unused for a while, it's recommended to charge its battery to 50%.

Would be great to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks

so you don't reduce the power consumption of the notebook.

 

[BFG-9000]

Draining a battery until the protection circuit automatically disconnects at ~2.5v per cell is just as damaging as fully charging it to 4.20v per cell. If you routinely do either, then you will only get the usually quoted 500 cycles until battery capacity permanently drops to 80% of new. If you do both then you will only get around 300 cycles but can use 100% of the energy in the battery each charge.

Usually modern laptops have a setting that allows you to limit maximum charge to say, 85%. And Windows has settings to allow you to automatically hibernate the laptop when the battery reaches 25%. If you do this then the battery is good for 2,000 cycles instead (see Fig6 Case 3), but you only get use of 60% of the energy in the battery. That's 5.5 years of daily cycling before the capacity degrades to 80%.

Normally devices are shipped with 30% charge because that is the maximum allowed by air shipping. This should last about a year before the protection circuits kick in, assuming normal self-discharge rates, but if the battery is installed and the device draws some idle power this can be much less (laptops use the main battery to maintain CMOS as the CMOS battery itself is such a low-capacity rechargeable, plus there's a circuit that does nothing but watch to see if the momentary power button is pressed).