Battery immediately empty after full charge

Help Fairphone 5
,
1

S the title says:

After a full overnight charge the battery was almost immediately empty after disconnecting the charger (original charger and cable from Fairphone).

When I bought the fp5, little under 2 years ago, I got a second battery and since then, of course, I didn’t need the powerbank often. When the battery got too low (yes, sometimes under the recommend 20%) I swapped as soon as possible.

On long walk with lots of photos, add gps navigation, the phone recently started draining faster. (Some software update? System? Photo app? ) (Not the photo app, Accord to battery usage info)

But now, for one or two weeks, when I charged the phone (battery) sometimes it shuts down apparently out of battery a few minutes after booting up.

Regardless if bootup was during charging or without charger connected.

Extra observations :

While the battery protection was enabled (max 80%) yesterday the phone pretended to be at 85% ?

85% boot, and within minutes 30, then rapidly to 20 and shutdown.

Is that battery already dying? It’s not even 2 years old.

P.S. the other battery does better but since it had 80% this morning, it’s down to 63 already. In 3 hours?

At least it’s not minutes but still suspicious.

2

Hi!

You might find out more about

  • your batteries’ health state
  • the discharge current

using a battery monitor app, like wattz/readme.md at master · dubrowgn/wattz · GitHub.

It is probably helpful to distinguish between

  1. the battery has, for whatever reason, only a very small capacity
  2. it has a normal capacity, but some programme drains a lot of current.

You wrote that

the battery was almost immediately empty after disconnecting the charger

can you be more quantitative here? Like “I pulled the plug and booom, within a second the phone died”, or “it drained within 20 minutes” (did the phone get noticebly warm?), or “I expected it to last 12h with my use pattern, but it was at 15% charge state after 3h”?

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3

Can you be more quantitive?

I will try to.

As, this morning the phone had been charging overnight. Well, from 23h or something. Ample time on eco-charge before the alarm sounded. (between 7 and 8, I think today was close to 7:30)

I unplugged the phone and see 85%, which should have been 80 of course. Suspicious.

But then opening it, unlock the screen: how can it be under 60? Already?

And in less than 20 minutes (when it’s supposed to sound a medication reminder) it simply shuts down.

Starting with the fairphone charger plugged in is ok.

Check charging settings: eco-charge, stop charging at 80%

Pull the plug. Gone. Shutdown. (Of course it had only been connected for a few minutes)

I think its the battery itself. The second one drains faster than I was used to, but holds well during normal use.

I want to check that battery app, but it has no comments at all in the play store. For a paying app that’s strange.

4

Often it helps to recalibrate the battery. Let it fully discahrge, attach to a charger, dont turn on and let it charge in 1 row up to 100%

5

Sounds like a broken battery to me. If you have someone with a FP5 around you should be able to test this.

6

Thank you. That seems to have worked.

I have always been suspicious about totally discharging a Li battery as I have often read that charging even “below 20%” could actually damage the battery. And the fp5 has a special setting to not charge over 80%. Maybe combining those two for a long time changes the calibration the counter?

Well uncharging to auto-shutdown and reacharging to 100% , on slow/eco charge mode and with the original FP charger/cable it seems that now both batteries are up to normal.

Thank you all for your help.

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