Batterylife's Activator

Testing

You'd have thought this product would be easy to test, but it isn't. It's only supposed to start working after a handful of charges, and only on a battery with a degradation problem. On top of this the process of testing, charging then timing a full discharge, isn't typical behaviour for a battery - it's possible this process will effect the amount of energy a battery
can store.


Here's what we're going to do to; we're going to take a Dell Latitude L400 laptop with its 6-12 month old battery and run its battery learning program (full battery charge, full discharge loop) repeatedly and measure the energy stored in the battery in each loop. After a handful of loops we'll whip the battery out, fit the Activator and continue looping the
battery-learning program. If we then plot the energy stored in the battery for each loop we should notice a discontinuity at the point at which we added the Activator if it works, and nothing if not...let's see how we get on!


Fitting the activator is easy, it's sticky on one side and easy to cut with a pair of scissors. It's supposed to be installed on the underside of your battery and should cover no less than 80% of its underside area. Our Dell's battery has a fairly large surface area to volume ratio but even on this battery there was some of the Activator sheet left over after installation.