Does Leaving Your Laptop Plugged In Shorten It’s Battery Life?
If you leave your laptop plugged in all the time, even when the battery is fully charged does it shorten the life of the battery?
That is the question that came up the other day and I didn’t know the answer, I always wondered myself as I use a laptop at work that is plugged into the AC power 99% of the time. Fortunately an answer to the question was very easy to find on the internet.
The short answer is yes, leaving your laptop plugged into mains power while the battery is fully charged will reduce the batteries capacity to hold a charge. When the battery is running consistently at full charge it causes the battery to chemically kill it’s self.
The best solution for minimising the damage to your battery from sustained charge is to charge your laptop’s battery to 100% and then pull out the plug and run it off battery power until you need to charge again.
I am by no means an authority on batteries and electricity so I will leave you with the source of my answer here, from a man who runs a blog dedicated to batteries and who’s credentials include working with a team of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab on the Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies (BATT) program, so I think if anyone is to be trusted on the subject of batteries it is this man.
A good question which was raised from the source article was from Prashanth who asked:
Don’t the laptop batteries have a limited number of “Charge cycles”. Won’t constant discharging and recharging of the battery use up these charge cycles thereby reducing its life time?
to which the answer was:
Yes and no. Yes in that cycling will decrease life. No in that the depth to which you cycle has a huge impact on life. The less depth you cycle to, more the life.
So you can either take my word for it or read Venkat Sriniva San’s article which explains the answer in great detail. Check it out here.
What are your experiences with this? Have you ever noticed your laptop’s battery life suffer because of this? Please comment below.
Tags: AC, advice, battery life, dead battery, electricity, fully charged, kill battery, laptop, leaving laptop plugged in, maximise battery life, notebook
Thanks for the info! This is a very important information. This helped a lot especially since looking for a decent battery to replace your original one can be hard.
Thanks, I’ve using my laptop while plugged in but a friend told me it has effect on the battery life.
This is an old view. Most Li-Poly batteries these days cut off upon full charge and run on AC power.