Warning: don't leave your Pandora plugged in for too long

[TrashyMG]

What fun is an exploding battery that takes freaking 6 months to do so.

 

[Eridger]

It should take a few days before any sort of irreversible damage starts, and weeks if not months before that damage reaches a hazardous point. Don't leave it plugged in for more than 48 hours and you'll be fine. If you unplug it after a day or two, let it run down about 5-10% to let it "cool" before plugging it in, you should be fine, more or less.

And following these basic tips will keep the battery from degrading abnormally? What I'd be worried about is the warranty running out and the battery going bad very soon after that. I'd be pretty pissed if I had to pay $40 for a new battery for this thing after only a year.

 

[Jourdy288]

Yeah. I took a picture after I put it in a trash bag. The battery is going in the garbage tomorrow. Kinda freaky. The Pandora works fine on AC still.


View attachment 86

Ah crud, aren't you suppose to recycle stuff like that :blink: ?

 

[WizardStan]

And following these basic tips will keep the battery from degrading abnormally? What I'd be worried about is the warranty running out and the battery going bad very soon after that. I'd be pretty pissed if I had to pay $40 for a new battery for this thing after only a year.

Under "normal"* use, a lipo battery should lose about 20% of it's capacity per year. So if it starts out with 10 hours of life, by the 12th month it should last about 8. By the 24th month it should last about 6.4 hours. By month 36, it will barely last 5 hours. At the end of your fourth year, that 10 hour battery will only last 4 hours


There's a lot of things you can do to minimize that loss, and hopefully with some tweaking to the driver we can get a few more years out of our batteries.


*normal being things like charging it up to 100% regularly, even though you only used about 20% per day.

 

[Eridger]

<snip>

Really hope OP will be around four more years so I can get a replacement battery then.


But I think by then I'll be playing with a Pandora2 or something similar.

 

[Tor]

Just to let you know how other devices handle this, my Android phone will vibrate and bring up a huge CHARGING DONE, PLEASE REMOVE CHARGER alert. The Pandora could probably use something similar, cause not everyone is gonna comb over the manual looking for battery 'best practices'.

The reason these devices pop up that message isn't to protect the battery, it's to get you to remove the charger because the charger may still eat some current. And vendors are now mandated (in some regions) to pop up that message to reduce the 'stand-by' wasted current. The irony is, of course, that modern switch-mode chargers are so efficient in this respect (unlike old 50/60-Hz transformer chargers) that the pop-up message consumes more electricity than keeping quiet and keep the charger in for days. Someone did the measurements with a Nokia device on this.


In any case, with large batteries like used in the Pandora the charging takes so long that you would typically leave it overnight or something. It's then quite unlikely that you would actually be there when the charging is finished. This works only for devices you can charge in 2 hours or (preferably) less.

 

[Poem58]

Under "normal"* use, a lipo battery should lose about 20% of it's capacity per year. So if it starts out with 10 hours of life, by the 12th month it should last about 8. By the 24th month it should last about 6.4 hours. By month 36, it will barely last 5 hours. At the end of your fourth year, that 10 hour battery will only last 4 hours


There's a lot of things you can do to minimize that loss, and hopefully with some tweaking to the driver we can get a few more years out of our batteries.


*normal being things like charging it up to 100% regularly, even though you only used about 20% per day.

Here's something strange then. I would consider my Dell Axim X3 PDA which is now about 6 or 7 years old to have nothing more than normal usage. It sits in the charger all day and gets removed when I need it (I used to use it much much more often and still have bouts of hour long gameplay on it) after all this time, it's Lipo battery still charges to 83%! I can still get hours and hours of use out of it so it's not even a misreported 83%. For something that has been steadily used and charged daily for that many years...I am amazed at the life of this battery so far.


I hope my Pandora battery is half this good.

 

[WizardStan]

For something that has been steadily used and charged daily for that many years...I am amazed at the life of this battery so far.

That is actually really impressive, and may be a remarkable fluke, especially if it's that old it probably has a lithium ion, not lithium polymer, battery with even shorter estimated lifespan.


Most reports I'm reading on the internet just now seem to indicate 2-3 years before the battery isn't really useful anymore, and I can't remember ever having a battery last that long, but until recently I've only ever owned regular lithium ion, nothing with lithium polymer in it.

 

[3vi1]

I'm glad I saw this topic. I've used my PSP for years with the battery in and it plugged up charging for weeks on end... and never had an issue with the original battery. I would not have thought it was bad to leave the Pandora plugged in too.


I know that those of us still awaiting our batch 1 Pandoras don't want to hear any talk of a "Pandora 2" yet. But, if that system does ever happen: OPT please consider this item as an opportunity for design improvement... to make the result more friendly to us non EE newbs.

 

[Poem58]

That is actually really impressive, and may be a remarkable fluke, especially if it's that old it probably has a lithium ion, not lithium polymer, battery with even shorter estimated lifespan.


Most reports I'm reading on the internet just now seem to indicate 2-3 years before the battery isn't really useful anymore, and I can't remember ever having a battery last that long, but until recently I've only ever owned regular lithium ion, nothing with lithium polymer in it.

Well, turns out I did have a brain fart and it was a Lithium Ion battery, but my previous PDA which I had for 2-4 years before I had the Dell Axim was in fact a Lipo Battery as I still have it sitting right here.(Which is strange cause I read your last statement to say it was not likely at all in the Axim days to have a lipo, let alone a couple years before. Which when brought to mind does make the fact the Axim is still charging quite remarkable) I just recently pulled it out of storage (it had harware faults like flickering screen backlight and button failures of which I was attempting to repair) I had it in a box in the basement for the last year and still charges to above 75% (The charge is reported in 25% blocks in the Win CE 2002 OS.) I do believe when I got my Jornada PDA, I Looked at the battery and realized I had yet to hear of Lipo batteries so it must have been brand new back then.


While I have not had a significant amount of usage scenarios on the broken one, I allowed my 6 year old to use it to transfer files from PDA to PDA with the buggy backlight off (reflective screen on the Jornada 568) and play games that were beamed over. Since I haven't made a new charge plug (old one broke) I wanted to make sure after a few hours I took it from him to keep from flattening the battery in case I was not able to work on it again for awhile. And after about 6 total hours of play it was still above 75%. So I'm beginning to think it's held up rather well also.


I always tried to make sure I researched the best models when I bought things like this but I never dreamed the original batteries would still function after 7 years for the Axim and around 10 for the Jornada. And I know the Jornada battery had totally flattened in long term storage (likely 2 years or so) without a charge. Yet still chugs away fine.


If it were just one battery I'd be inclined to agree on luck or fluke, but both of these are ARM based hand held battery powered machines in an era where even they could murder a bulky battery in a few hours. So the Pocket PC design must have been amazingly well suited to keeping batteries conditioned well or something! Could it have something to do with how it charges given it was designed to live in the charge cradle and not be charged and removed?

 

[myownlittlworld]

Since this seems like something new users might want to be aware of ("Don't leave your Pandora plugged in indefinitely!"), I've added this information to the new user's wiki. Please edit it up, but leave the warning in.