Battery Health: A Few Tips

Hey guys, this is Maads 101, and today I'm going to be telling you a little bit about battery health.

So if you're not familiar with this idea, basically what happens is over time, as you keep on recharging your computer again and again and using it a lot, etc., over time what will happen is the battery will actually start to be able to hold less charge than it could when you first bought your computer.

So after you've recharged your computer 300 or 400 times, it might only be able to hold like 80% of how much it could hold when you bought it. You'll not notice this because you'll have to start recharging your computer more often and stuff like that.

If you have an older MacBook or something like that, you actually will be able to replace the battery—just buy a new one. But if you have one of the more recent models of Apple laptops, you simply can't replace the battery. You'd have to take it to the Apple Store, have them replace it over the course of a couple of days, and then give it back to you.

So this is kind of a pain, and because of that, I'm going to be giving you a couple tips on how to keep your battery as healthy as possible over as long a time as possible. Now obviously, no matter what you do, your battery will lose health eventually. But it's a matter of how fast it loses health and how well you maintain it to keep it healthy for as long as possible.

Now, the most important tip I can give, and a lot of other ideas branch off from this, is to prevent your battery from overheating. So if you've noticed—maybe you probably have—when you leave your laptop plugged in for 2 or 3 hours to let it charge up all the way, it will actually get very hot, especially around where the charger plugs into the side of the computer.

This basically means that the battery is getting pretty hot—it's probably above 100° Fahrenheit—and that's just not good for the battery. You want to try to keep your battery as close to room temperature as possible for chemistry reasons, which I can't explain to you, but it just so happens that that's how it works.

One of the ways to prevent your battery from overheating is to not charge your computer and discharge your computer all the way. Because your battery heats up over time as it charges, if you let your computer only discharge to like 20 or 30%, then you charge it up to like 70% and then let it charge down to 30 and then charge it up to 70, it'll actually be better for the battery, because the battery won't overheat as much.

Now, you might be saying, “Well, that makes no sense,” or something like that, because there's a lot of ideas in the air that if you discharge your battery all the way and then charge it up all the way, that's actually the best thing for your battery.

That would be good if you had something like a nickel cadmium battery, where there's something called a memory issue, where if you don't discharge the battery all the way and then recharge it all the way, the battery will start to not have as much accuracy in reporting how much charge it has. But lithium-ion batteries don't have that same issue to as far an extent at least.

Because of that, for a lithium-ion battery like the one in your Mac, you really do only want to charge it up to 70 or 80, and there's no reason to charge it all the way unless you want to actually utilize it. Like if you want to take your computer out for 5 hours and your battery lasts 5 hours, then you're going to want to charge it up all the way. But if you don't have to, don't do it.

The other thing to prevent your battery from overheating is to just not leave it plugged in all the time. Leaving your computer plugged in all the time is bad for numerous reasons. First off, like if you just have a bunch of charge sitting in your battery for a long time, that's not good for your battery, but also it does cause your laptop to get hot, the battery to overheat, and that's bad for the chemical process in a battery.

So those are just some tips—quick tips—on how to basically maintain your battery as much as possible. Beyond that, there's not really much you can do.

But now, I'm going to go ahead and show you how to check how healthy your battery actually is. So if we go on over and you go into Spotlight right up here in the top right-hand corner, and you type "terminal" and hit enter, a terminal window will pop up. All you have to type is i sp -l space and then a vertical bar—that's just shift back slash—space grep dasi capacity, hit enter, and wait a couple seconds.

Now here's a ton of specs about your battery, which will just get dumped right out. So at the top here, you can see this thing—it says "Max Capacity" and there's a number next to it, and I'll explain what unit this is in a second. Then you have your "design capacity" here, and here's another number.

Now, to figure out the percentage that your battery is in terms of battery health, all you have to do is take the Max Capacity and divide it by the design capacity. The Max Capacity is the current capacity of your battery. The design capacity is the capacity it's supposedly shipped with.

If I just do this calculation real quick, I'd be doing 7967 over 8460, and so that's about 94% is how healthy my battery is. If you look here, it says "cycle count." What this basically means is I've charged my computer 356 times.

I've gone through 356 charge cycles, and I've lost like 6% of my battery's capacity. That's actually pretty decent—that's a good number. It could be better, but I also don't follow my own rules; like I don't always charge my computer up only to 70. I usually forget and let it charge up all the way.

But I have a feeling that if I followed my own guidelines more strictly, I would actually have better battery health. But I don't really do that because I don't even think it's that worth it. But you can see how healthy your battery is and how well you take care of it, etc.

Now, let me just explain to you what unit these are. The unit here, the design capacity and the Max Capacity, are measured in milliamp hours. Now, a milliamp hour just means if your computer is drawing a milliamp of current, it'll last that many hours.

Now the usual amount of current that a MacBook will draw is between 1 and 2 amps—that's like between 1,000 and 2,000 milliamps. So if I took my capacity here—or let's take my design capacity, 8460—and if I divided it by 1500, let's say that would be 1.5, I would get 5.64 hours, which is a pretty decent time on this model.

I don't remember Apple's exact projections; maybe it was closer to—if you used 1.3 milliamps—that'd be like 6.5 hours. But that's a quick way to calculate maybe how much time it would take based on your Max Capacity to completely discharge your computer.

Of course, the amperage—the average amount of amps that an average user will use—depends on what they use their computer for, what kind of computer they have, how they use it, etc.

But yeah, that's basically how you figure out how healthy your laptop is and your battery in your laptop is, and how you can try to keep it healthier. So I hope you learned something. Thanks for watching, subscribe, and goodbye.