Product Lifecycle Assessment: OEM C4500BAT-6 for System76 Pangolin Performance 8, Halfway Mark

C4500BAT-6 charge & discharge cycle graph from Power Statistics utility

 Just over two years ago, I had written a post [1] after having bought a new battery from System76 for my then 6 year old Pangolin Performance laptop. The first battery had survived for some 5 odd years before being degraded in capacity to such an extent that it was only able to deliver about 45 minutes of power after disconnection. 

The new battery was ordered directly from System76, and is now just over 2 years old. How has it fared over that time period, and where do things stand now?

I should note to start off that the battery has delivered reliably and without issues since being brought online. The laptop has had (and still has) a tendency to suddenly turn off without warning when under heavy load, but I haven't been able to identify the root cause and doubt that the battery is the causal factor.

The TLP Battery Management Tool has been a great application that I installed along with the upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 last year, and provides excellent data and statistics for monitoring and analysis. It indicates that two years on, the battery is now at or approaching 50% of its original capacity. That leads me to infer that I may be able to get another year or so of practical and usable battery life out of it, before retiring the laptop completely (which seems unnecessary, since it still performs quite well) or ordering a new battery (which seems like a good idea).

Using TLP and the Power Statistics Application which comes with Ubuntu, I ran the laptop and battery through some tests over the course of a few hours. During that time, I ran the laptop through some paces under normal use, full-load and standby while the battery charged and discharged at least thrice. Some screenshots from that period are shown below.

C4500BAT-6 device information as registered by the Power Statistics utility

Charge-discharge cycles during test period

Screenshot of Power Statistics and TLP generated data.

The data points and charts generated during the test show a expected charge and discharge curves. In order to prolong battery life as much as possible, I developed the habit over the last year or so of keeping the battery between 20-80% - charging when it had dropped down to around 20% and disconnecting when it had reached around 80%. 

However, for this test I allowed it to charge to 100% and discharge on the last test to almost 0%. I also noted the usable productive time that was possible during the last test, and noted a working time of just over 1 hour and 10 minutes. That seems like a favourable result; when I had run the first charge-discharge test with the battery two years ago, it had managed 2 hours and 7 minutes [2]. That indicates the following in terms of performance:

• Decrease in battery capacity: ~ 50%
• Loss of battery life with 50% reduction in capacity: 47 minutes
• Maximum achievable battery life with remaining capacity: 80 minutes
• Percentage of practical working time compared to original: ~ 63%
• Original price: $229.99 CAD ($169.39 USD with USPS shipping cost)

With an expected average of 3-4 years of operational life in total, that works out to about $57.50 CAD/year. That seems a reasonable price to pay, but I should note that, though still going strong, this laptop is now almost 8 years old. 

Replacement C4500BAT-6 batteries are available for significantly less from online suppliers such as Amazon. Those won't be covered by System76's warranty since they're not from it's recognized supplier. Nonetheless, if a compatible battery is available from a non-OEM supplier backed by a reasonable warranty, it would be interesting to see when the time comes if they deliver the same or better performance and value for substantially less cost.

To conclude, I'm happy with how things have worked out with this product so far. Now if I could only fix that sudden and random shutdown problem that seems to happen out of the blue once in a while...