Don't discard your "dead" Laptop battery pack

[jkeny]

My story:
There are 2 Dell laptops in the house & when thebattery pack in the Inspiron 6000 would no longer charge, I swapped over the battery pack from the Vostro 1000 laptop but OF COURSE it would not work so I put it back. Hey ho I thought, I'm not buying yet another battery pack as I don't use this laptop way from mains.

Anyway, a couple of months later the Vostro battery pack stopped working also. Just last week I decided to crack open both of these packs . What do I discover - in the official Dell pack all the Panasonic 18650 Li-ion batteries are fully charged & working fine (3 sets of 3 batteries in each set). The pack isn't working because there is an id chip in either the pack or laptop that is no longer working even though the batteries are fine.

I consider this a scam perpetrated by Dell to make money! Check it out here for other Dell models DELL AC power adapter not recognized | The Laptop Junction This ID chip stops the battery packs from being interchangeable between laptops also - what a scam!

The cheap battery pack I bought from ebay had 1 set of 3 batteries in the pack still fully charged & working, the rest not.

So I have 12 Li-ion 3.3V batteries in perfect working order.

I would recommend everybody to crack open their laptop battery pack before recycling it & checking them. I'll also be checking my local recycling center for free Li-Ion batteries when I need them

[Sch3mat1c]

Funny, my Inspiron 5160 is still running. I don't take it off power very often though (it's a bit of a secondary computer these days, just whiling away the CPU-hours with folding@home ).

I had a problem where the charge light was blinking a funny color, like the battery was dead (no message, like "not recognized" though). I took it out for a while, put it back in and it worked, ran it from battery for a few minutes to make sure it didn't drop out super fast. I haven't ran it for hours, but that it still works is something of a miracle I suppose. That battery must be over 5 years old by now.

Tim

[DigitalJunkie]

Lots of laptop packs do that,it's highly annoying. I just took apart one last night because of that,all of the cells appear fine and hold a charge under load,but it wouldn't work at all in the laptop.

[Magura]

It's the same story with many cell phone batteries.

The cell itself is mostly of reasonable quality, but the rest of the battery pack, is about as lousy quality as possible.

Some are even programmed to die after a preset number of cycles


Magura

[jkeny]

As somewhat knowledgeable in electronics we should all disseminate this info on the web so that the general public begin to put pressure on the laptop & phone manufacturers. This is the only way it will change. I consider it a scam operated by manufacturers!!!

[djQUAN]

my IBM laptop is about 5 years old and the batteries still have decent capacity. I use it both on AC and on battery.

[ikoflexer]

There's a trick around here, they'll price a cordless drill very low but the kit battery is pretty much garbage and you need to get a replacement soon after the purchase, at, guess what, much higher price than the cordless drill was initially. But hey, I pulled the cells out of a few laptop batteries and fit them in the cordless drill battery pack. Behold, my $19.99 cordless drill just became a lithium-ion wonder

[Magura]

Originally Posted by ikoflexer

But hey, I pulled the cells out of a few laptop batteries and fit them in the cordless drill battery pack. Behold, my $19.99 cordless drill just became a lithium-ion wonder

How did you work around the problem of the NiMh charger not being suitable of Li-Ion battery pack?


Magura

[ikoflexer]

Originally Posted by Magura

How did you work around the problem of the NiMh charger not being suitable of Li-Ion battery pack?
Magura

Now you're being subtle! Let's just say that I don't leave home when they're recharging using the original recharger.

I discourage anyone from doing this crazy thing, of course

[Magura]

Originally Posted by ikoflexer

Now you're being subtle!

And no subtle explosions or the like so far?

Which voltage did you end up with and what's the nominal voltage of the drill?

Asking cause I've been pondering to throw some Li-Po cells in my power drill.

Magura