Final thoughts for 2018 about Battery life preservation

Nightchill 

Every battery can only sustain a finite number of charge and discharge cycles, after which it starts wearing off quickly.  

There’s no way to “overcharge” these batteries. When you get to 100% charge and leave your laptop plugged in, the charger will stop charging the battery. The laptop will just run directly off the power cable. After the battery discharges a bit, the charger will kick into gear again and top the battery off. There’s no risk of damaging the battery by charging it over its capacity.  

Leaving your laptop plugged in will not cause short term damage, but if you only ever use it on AC power you’ll almost certainly find that after a year the battery’s capacity has been significantly reduced. Similarly, if you only ever use it on battery power you’ll get through the battery’s discharge cycles quicker.  

So, the best solution is something of a compromise between the two: use it on battery power some days, and keep it plugged in on others. And in all cases, you’ll want to ensure it doesn’t get too hot.  

Please go to Settings > System > Battery and click Battery usage by app, you can see which apps are using the most battery resources. The list will show you the percentage of battery your apps have used in the past 6 or 24 hours or the past week. Click on it and toggle off the switch for Managed by Windows and then make sure the box remains unchecked for Allow app to run background tasks. 

Instead of digging into the battery page in settings to switch from high performance to battery saver mode or vice versa, you now can just click or tap the battery icon in the taskbar. You'll be able to move a slider from Best battery life to best performance or a balanced mode in between.

You can go into Power & sleep settings by clicking its link in the battery menu from the taskbar (or by going to Settings > System > Power & sleep), and you can shorten the time before the display turns off or your laptop goes into sleep mode when it's running on battery power. The shorter you set these times, the longer your battery will last.

When your computer requires more power than the AC adapter can provide, it will stop charging to allow it to draw additional power from the battery. The system will resume charging the battery when the power demands are lower. This may occur during heavy gaming sessions. If the battery discharges below 30% while using the AC adapter, the system will stop using power from the battery until the charge is above 40% again.

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Nightchill
As a battery gets older, it loses capacity. If the battery's capacity when new was 4000 mAh, and its current capacity is only 3600 mAh (90% of new), then it has a battery wear level of 10%.

That said, battery wear is mostly caused by deep charge cycles. That is, charging to 100% and discharging to 0%. Shallow cycles (say, charging to 70% and discharging to 30% put almost no wear on the battery.

Newer laptops are programmed not to fully charge nor discharge the battery in order to prevent wear and maintain battery longevity. One of the ways I've seen some devices do this is by "faking out" Windows into thinking the battery has more wear than it really does. So the battery may be 4000 mAh when new, but the battery tells Windows it has 10% wear. This prevents Windows from charging it past 90%, thus preventing a deep cycle.

This is just one of the wear-prevention strategies out there, and I don't know if the Acer A715-72G is using it. So it could just be reporting a fake wear level to Windows. If you let the battery discharge completely for a long period, it may have self-discharged past 0% enough to damage the battery and the reported wear level may be accurate.

The only true test will be to monitor the wear level over several months of use. If it holds steady between 15%-20%, then it's probably nothing to worry about. (Measuring battery capacity and wear level is a bit of a black art, as it requires extremely accurate measurements of voltage. Things like discharge rate and temperature can drastically change the results, so a +/- 3% change in wear level day-to-day is not unusual.)

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