What are the ways to restore the laptop battery?

Mobility becomes one of the main advantages of a successful person. Not so long ago, desktop computers dominated our homes, which are now actively crowding out laptops, tablets, and smartphones. And, if the tablet and smartphone are somewhat limited in their computing capabilities, then laptops may well replace the desktop. Going on a business trip or vacation, you can take your workplace with your laptop. These are documents, films, music, games, etc. In flight, you can pass the time watching movies. However, all this is possible as long as the battery is in working condition. If the laptop battery is out of order, then goodbye mobility. The laptop is instantly attached to the outlet and turns into a regular laptop. In this case, you have to buy a new battery. But what if the batteries for your outdated laptop are no longer sold? Or do you just want to tackle the problem yourself? Then let's talk about do-it-yourself laptop battery recovery.

Before talking about how to restore a laptop battery, you need to figure out in which cases recovery is required. Immediately, we note that in the article we are talking about rechargeable batteries with lithium cells. Such batteries are installed in almost all modern laptops. Manufacturers claim that their service life is approximately 400-500 charge-discharge cycles. In terms of time, this is approximately 3-4 years. Although maybe 2 years. It depends on the intensity of use of your laptop.

After the resource for charge-discharge cycles for the battery is exhausted, its capacity is reduced by 2 times. At this point, the battery life of the laptop is reduced to 1 hour. Now there are two main types of batteries: and. You can read about the features of these batteries in the articles at the links.

The laptop battery in most cases has 4-8 cans. Sometimes there are 2 or 12. The controller controls the process of charging and discharging these cans. This is a printed circuit board with microcircuits connected to the battery cells.

So, when laptop battery recovery is required:

• battery cells (banks) have exhausted their resource. A situation may arise when individual banks do not work. In this case, the control controller is working. In this case, the defective elements (or all at once) are replaced. This procedure is called "repacking" the battery;
• The batteries have been deeply discharged. In this situation, the banks are healthy, but the battery controller is blocking their charging due to low voltage. It "thinks" the elements are faulty and disables them. In this case, do-it-yourself laptop battery recovery comes down to balancing cans. This is done using a charger with a balancing function. If balancing does not work, then you need to charge each lithium can separately;
• the controller is broken. What exactly failed on the controller is difficult to diagnose at home. If you do the battery recovery yourself, you will have to replace it with a new one.

In the image below you can see the device of the laptop battery inside:

Tools to revive a laptop battery

To repair a laptop battery, you will need the following tools:

• Multimeter;
• Knife, screwdriver or other suitable tools for disassembling the battery case;
• Soldering iron, solder, flux;
• MFP charger with balance type function;
• Glue, electrical tape for assembling the case after battery restoration;
• New lithium batteries.

Lithium battery cells should be selected with electrical characteristics similar to the old ones. That is, you have to search and order similar new batteries on the Internet. If there are suitable ones, then it will be possible to restore the laptop battery.

How to restore a laptop battery?

Battery Disassembly and Diagnostics

Before reanimating the battery, you need to disassemble it and check it. Quite a complicated matter, since battery manufacturers do not care at all about the maintainability of their products. The most common case connection option is sizing. Therefore, you have to pretty dig deeper using improvised means. Rarely are battery cases assembled on latches. It's much easier with them. There are also running options when the body is made of solid plastic. Here you will have to tinker a lot.

In the case of a glued body, the algorithm of actions should be as follows. Heat the seam a little with a hair dryer and lightly tap it with a hammer. Try to heat the seam locally so that the entire battery does not heat up. Heating for lithium cells is dangerous. After that, open the case along the seam with a sharp tool. It can be a knife, a thin screwdriver, a scalpel, etc. Do not pierce the case through, so as not to damage the lithium banks and the controller with a knife.

After opening the case, visually inspect the inside of the battery for defects. The controller board must not have burnt-out elements or other damage. Check out the banks. They should not be swollen, have smudges and damage. This is important when replacing individual elements and performing balancing. If you are replacing worn-out batteries, replace them all at once.

Use a multimeter to check the voltage at the battery terminals. In the event of a deep discharge and the blocking of the elements by the controller, the voltage on the battery should be. The value will be small, but it should be. If it is not there, then the cause of the battery failure is a break in the assembly or a failure of the controller.

With a deep discharge, you can try balancing. To do this, the wires that go from the assemblies to the controller are soldered from the controller. After that, they are connected to the charger in balancer mode. On the controller board, you should also find points for balancing and connect the device to them. It may well be that this will not help. Then you have to disassemble the elements and restore each of them. If this does not help, then it means that they have exhausted their resource. In this case, buy similar new ones and change to them.

Battery cell replacement

If you decide to replace the batteries in your battery, be sure to draw a diagram of their connection before disconnecting them. Take paper and draw on it the elements with the connection points of the positive and negative terminals. In addition, mark in detail the soldering points of the assemblies, their connection to the controller. If there is a thermal sensor, draw where it was soldered.

Before you can restore the battery, you need to find new battery banks. To do this, look at the labeling of your elements and find out their exact electrical parameters.

There is only one general advice that can be given here. Buy the same items as yours. Everything else needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Laptop batteries often use 18650 cylindrical lithium batteries. Their nominal voltage is 3.7 volts and the capacity is 2200 mAh. Although all this may differ even within the framework of the products of one manufacturer for different models. The voltage can be 3.6 volts, and the capacity is 2400, 1100, 2600 and others.

After purchasing new items, you can restore the laptop battery. In the battery assembly, the cells are connected by spot welding. This option cannot be implemented independently at home. So, connect the batteries using soldering. Instead of tape, use copper wire. Here you need the connection diagram drawn earlier. If you carefully disassembled the battery, then you may have retained a connecting tape that can be used for assembly instead of wires. Soldering try to do as quickly as possible. Otherwise, the elements will overheat, which is contraindicated for them. After connecting the cans, solder the temperature sensor and controller to them.