AN515-58 Battery limit function is not working

kazamakun
kazamakun Member Posts: 7

Tinkerer

Answers

  • kazamakun
    kazamakun Member Posts: 7

    Tinkerer

    I was a little bit frustrated that after receiving my AN515-58 from the repair center due to fan issue that the Battery limit function was not working, noticing that it charged past 90%.

    I tried uninstalling then installing a package I downloaded from the Acer website and it also did not display the Batter charge limit function.

    I remembered that there was an issue before with Acer Care Center that it just does not start - the solution was to run the ACCStd.exe app as Administrator and that fixed the issue.

    I tried the same thing with the current install of ACC - it worked!

    This app is totally buggy and slow though.

    Hope this helps someone.

  • kazamakun
    kazamakun Member Posts: 7

    Tinkerer

    One more thing.

    If you open ACC without the elevated privileges, the Battery charge limit options - for some reason - goes away. Opening it as Administrator displays it again. I wish Acer would look into this.

  • VanSwift
    VanSwift Member Posts: 7

    Tinkerer

    I ran setup.exe as administrator, then opened Care Center as administrator - still just a 1-option battery check, no charge limit. 2021 Swift 1.

    I've been using the 60% limit available on an Asus Vivobook, and love it. I tested the effect by charging up to 80%, then setting the charge cutoff at 60%. Running on wall power, battery charge dropped by 1% an hour - when running on battery power, it's about 16% an hour. So battery wear is reduced by a factor of 16 compared to running on battery. As for why starting bypass at 100% is worse than at 60% - it's like keeping a balloon fully inflated or half inflated - fully inflated keeps it stressed to its limit, and wears it out more quickly.

  • Puraw
    Puraw ACE, Member Posts: 14,412 Trailblazer

    What has an ASUS VivoBook to do with Acer Care center software? Your theory about limiting the charging of a Lithium-Ion battery is wrong, don't believe all the hype on the internet. You can leave the power adapter plugged-in 24/7 without causing any extra battery wear.

  • VanSwift
    VanSwift Member Posts: 7

    Tinkerer

    There's hype on the internet, and real knowledge properly presented with sources explained, and stubborn unsupported repetition of sincere convictions - which are not generally reliable, given that such unsupported repetition displays a lack of understanding of how real knowledge is formed and transmitted.

    Here's an eminent and reliable source (Battery University, site of the inventor of the programmable battery analyzer), who explains the basis of his own knowledge in a proper scientific way, on battery lifespan as a function of depth of charge: https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries

    His chart shows that total power delivery over the lifespan of a lithium battery is increased by 50% if one keeps its charge in the 20-80% range, and by 100% if one keeps it in the 30-70% range.

  • VanSwift
    VanSwift Member Posts: 7

    Tinkerer

    I did look for third party options, and they don't seem to exist. For example https://windowsreport.com/software-stop-battery-charging/ actually describes two alarms you can use to prompt you to unplug at some power level - and the Asus Battery Health Charging utility, which is Asus specific.

    Unplugging puts you on battery power - consuming lifespan. Bypassing flips a switch in the device to disconnect the battery - functionally similar to removing it, which of course preserves lifespan. Asus, Lenovo and especially Dell give the user good access to this switch - Dell has a slider on which you can set both start-charging (say, at 40%) and stop-charging (say, at 60%) levels. Acer has the switch - as is proven by the fact that Care Centre intermittently provides access to it. Without access, your options are to abuse the battery by using it all the time, or abuse it by keeping it under the strain of full charge.

    Battery University is a fantastic site for real education on this, by an industry pioneer who literally wrote the book on it: Batteries in a Portable World - A Handbook on Rechargeable Batteries for Non-Engineers. Poke around there for awhile, and you may - like me - regretfully cross Acer off your list of options. I was an Acer Swift user for the past 6 years - and indeed retired my beloved first Swift only because the battery wore out and no replacement was available. I was about to buy a third Swift when I got educated about bypass, and heard about this debacle with the disappearing setting. That's why I bought the Asus instead, and now smile every time I glance down at the green bypass indicator and know that my battery is sleeping peacefully and will have a long life.

  • Puraw
    Puraw ACE, Member Posts: 14,412 Trailblazer
    edited September 2023

    Believe what you want to believe, but the general consensus on this forum and the industry is that battery limiting to prevent wear is a myth, anecdotal and not tested.

    One of many opinions on limiting battery charging:
    Don't Worry About Overcharging Your Li-Ion Laptop's Battery.
    There is a persistent myth that you can overcharge a laptop battery and, through that overcharging, damage the battery. There are many ways to decrease the lifespan of your battery (like leaving your poor laptop to roast in your car on a hot day), but overcharging isn't one of them.

    Even ancient laptops have built-in protection against overcharging and potential damage caused by packing too much energy into a battery that can't hold it all. You can certainly damage a laptop with a cheap out-of-spec or damaged charger but plugging it in with the original charger or a high-quality replacement won't turn your battery into a lithium-ion firebomb.

    When your laptop battery reaches 100%, it stops charging, and it won't resume charging until the battery level drops below 100% again. While this can lead to a pattern of the battery discharging slightly and then getting topped off again (which can degrade the battery over time), it won't overcharge the battery and damage it.

    Accept that a rechargeable battery has a limited lifespan and learn to live with that. When you get 4-5 years out of a Li-Ion laptop battery you probably need to replace it, same with your power adapter.

    BTW: You are not mentioning that this battery limiting can affect BIOS and MS ACPI battery protocol.

  • VanSwift
    VanSwift Member Posts: 7

    Tinkerer

    I agree that "overcharging" is a myth, and sympathize with your exasperation at hearing it cited so often; but there is real harm from leaving batteries routinely at full charge (and it's understandable that "overcharging" might be used as a casual term for this). Current normal practice is ill-informed and damaging, and something as simple as the switch Asus provides (battery cutoff at 60%) will greatly extend the life of a battery on a computer that is left plugged in all the time. This isn't rumor or myth - it's scientific fact - the opposite of "anecdotal and not tested." The experiments have been done, and the data exists. Follow my link to Isidor Buchmann's site, and you will realize how wrong it is to paint what he presents (e.g., experiments at Dalhousie University, unrolling battery membranes to study the chemistry of capacity decline) with that brush.

    As for "general consensus" - faith in it is the mechanism of myth and rumor. The difference between what most people believe and what is actually proven and known is often immense.

    As for whether it's very important: that is indeed debatable, on grounds that tech advances fast enough that the device as a whole is generally obsolete by the time gratuitously-damaged batteries expire. However accepting the fact that batteries are consumables is not a sound reason to refrain from implementing easy measures which are proven to greatly extend their life.