Maybe the flashing light *while the laptop is off* indicates a higher than normal battery power output? I mean, it shouldn't light up at all when the laptop is off and unplugged.

16v is already over the +-5% tolerance level that's required to accept and while the power regulators are able to cope with it since most of the stuff in the laptop runs at lower voltages, the flashing light may be method the engineers chose to denote such an abnormal state.

Who knows, but I wish I could take it apart and poke it with my multimeter

Still, keep in mind that HWiNFO executes several things before taking the battery measurement and it never updates it, it's not an accurate tool for these kinds of measurements

And there's no way in hell they're using Panasonic cells inside of that unit, at least not brand new ones, plus the control chip may be lying about a whole lot of things, don't know if any of you have experienced it but kind of like when it states the charge is say 20% and then suddenly turns off? It's just a *beeeeeep* of a controller.

The problem with taking the laptop back to Acer and their official tech support (one of them at least) is that the original battery has been disassembled, and this one being an aftermarket replacement and not being original... tsk, I'd have a hard time convincing them to take a look at the laptop (I would though, just for kicks haha).

Ideally, 14.8v, that implies the cells inside to have an average voltage of 3.7 during discharge; but sellers (and manufacturers of aftermarket batteries) sometimes exaggerate the battery properties, either voltage or capacity.

For example it may read 14.8v and 2800mAh while having 3.6v 2600mAh cells inside, but I don't currently know of any trusted seller for batteries I'm afraid, so I can't point you to it.

In any case, a 14.6v (if it delivers that indeed) or even 14.4v could work just fine if quality cells are inside, after all the larger 6-cell battery for that model operates at 11.1v, the power regulators can accommodate to it.

Not to over complicate the thing, but check that their claims are correct at least in the listing (sometimes they mess up a simple multiplication): Rated voltage x Capacity = Energy

For the original ones (the larger one has 2 sets of 3 cells each in parallel, that's why I doubled the capacity):

14.8v x 2800 mAh = 41440 mWh (41.4 Wh)
11.1v x (2800 mAh x 2) = 62160 mWh (62.1 Wh)

If you do the math for the battery you're about to buy and it doesn't match their numbers, say they claim 41.4Wh while having 14.4v and 2800mAh cells don't even bother buying that battery. It could be a mistake, but chances are they're lying.

aphanic said:

Technically, yes, there's no problem at all, but there are some caveats.

1. Cells are balanced inside of the battery when charging, there's circuitry for that, if you're using older cells (the 3 original ones that came with the laptop) and a new one I'm guessing they won't hold the same capacity... and the BMS (the balancer so to speak) may have a hard time.
   
   When re-purposing battery cells for another thing, you usually note down the capacity the cell is able to hold at that time because it's been used before. So you understand better, because I sometimes write stuff that's hard to understand, the cells of your original battery are able to hold 2800 mAh each at their rated voltage, since they've been used for a while and without going into why they may be able to hold 2540 mAh now (and the number is likely going to be different for each); except for the dead one, which is the one that made you unable to use the battery as such to begin with.
   
   So when building a new battery using those 3 old cells you should (ideally) know how much energy are they able to store and pair them with one that is able to hold more or less the same. Ideally, in practice you could be fine using another one.
   
   That's what many sellers of "brand new" replacement batteries do, the cells inside are actually refurbished from other batteries and they tweak their imitation of the control chip to report the values they want, or the manufacturer they want, etc.
   
   
2. Say you have 4 cells you wanted to use to make the battery, when you took them out you probably noticed they were weld by a thin stripe of nickle (some metal tabs) and they were probably weld by a spot welder. Those things are expensive, but they're used not to warm up the cell too much, the welding is done pretty much instantly. You *could* weld them with a regular soldering iron, it's not the safest of things (remember lithium batteries ought to be handled with care), but it could work. And if for some reason there's someone in a shop near you that has or has built a spot welder it'd be preferable to ask for their help with rebuilding the battery.
   
   
3. Don't use any of the chips from the replacement battery, go with the original ones. Not only they're not reverse engineered and all, but you know they worked fine with your laptop, always prefer the original stuff over a cheap knockoff.

Still, there's something I have to point out if you go that route that I'd seen in the past, but it's been a while since I had to rebuild a battery (nowadays they're all flat like those of phones). I don't recall the laptop brand it was, but after rebuilding the battery because the control chip had already deemed the battery to be "broken" it wouldn't report the newly made capacity correctly and Windows for example would say it was a broken battery. Far from it, because the cells were new, but it's like it had stored the data on the previous cells and didn't measure it again, needless to say the battery worked just fine.

But! Acer seems to have that battery reset procedure I've been reading about in the forums (either a pin in the back of the laptop or pressing the power button for 15+ seconds), that could make the controller check for the state again or refresh its measurements, etc.

After telling you all this, consider the time you'd have to put into it, maybe it's better to risk it getting a new replacement battery (from a different vendor / brand) and see how it behaves. If it gives you trouble, return it right away and look for another . Seriously though, there's no foolproof path forward I can think of

this got work for me. Thanks hell a lot. Saved me in this quarantine