Strange battery problems with XPS 9550

[koenheemskerk]

Hi all,

It seems that I have a strange problem with my battery when running the latest build of Catalina. I've fully followed the tutorial, and everything works as it should, except for the battery.

It charges as it should, however, when reached 100%, it decharges to approximately 50% with normal use, and then drops to 6% all of a sudden. It then shuts down and I have to charge it. Sometimes when fully charged, it just drops down from 100% to 6% at once. It is the 56Wh battery, which I have already swapped out for a new one, so it's not the battery that is faulty. It seems like Macintosh is eating the battery like crazy; if I run Coconutbattery, there is approximately 35% wear, and I've been using this for 1 month. The cycles are counting up very quickly (348, which is obviously not true, more like 10 or so), and temperature is not correct (-273.2*C, so I assume no sensor is present), furthermore Coconutbattery indicates that it is discharging with 11W up to 20W, depending on the tasks. Is this a common problem? Can it be due to the fact that my battery is 56Wh instead of 87Wh or 94Wh which was also possible in this model? I further have an NVMe disk, which could also be a part of the problem. Charing with the official 130W adapter. The orange light at the front of the laptop sometimes turns on at 70% remaining battery, indicating that it is soon dropping to 6%. I've no clue; as far as I know, I haven't installed incorrect kext or something. Is there someone willing to investigate into this? No other comments on internet are stating the same problems. See screenshots for battery health history and information about the battery, both via Coconutbattery.

[krim404]

this is not a common issue.
please try to calibrate the battery first - complete discharge, then do a full charge without interruption.

if the issue persists it is possible that your battery is dying.

[koenheemskerk]

Forgot to mention, I've tried several battery recalibrations. I was also assuming a defective battery the first time, but now a second battery is dying, that seemed to much coincidence.

[krim404]

the repository does not include anything hardcoded for the battery. my battery died after 2 years of usage and my spare lost 20% design capacity just for the fact of being produced and been in the basement for two years. so it is possible - the dell batterys are very fragile in comparison to batteries from different brands (ex. apple)

[lamhoangtung]

I can confirm having this kind of jump in battery indication on both Mojave (my previous setup) and Big Sur as well.

Mine had 87 Wh battery

[koenheemskerk]

I can confirm having this kind of jump in battery indication on both Mojave (my previous setup) and Big Sur as well.

Mine had 87 Wh battery

Thanks! How old is your battery and is it the genuine Dell battery?

[lamhoangtung]

I had replace my battery once. It was about a year old now, and is a genuine Dell battery. The bigger issue here is that there are time my laptop will suddenly turn off at about 50% battery without any notification, forcing me to plug it in to turn it back on with the charge start at 0%

[Mateo1234454545]

I have this exact same issue on my hackintosh Dell 5570 .

[KYBOSH-san]

The battery monitoring issue has been present for me since I installed Catalina on my 9550 a few years ago. I only trust it when it says its 100% full. After that, is like reading tea leaves. I can run on my battery at 0% (yes ZERO PERCENT) for 30-40 minutes of Youtube watching. I have tried recalibrating but it doesnt make much of a difference. I have noticed this with my original OEM battery as well as an aftermarket battery which I installed after the OEM died.

I believe mac batteries are either made differently or have different circuitry which do not translate well with regular non-Apple hardware. I will actually run the same battery test on the Windows OS (dual boot) to see if I get the same behavior. If so, then the culprit can only be the battery itself. If not then its an issue with how Mac OS interacts with the XPS hardware.

Based on OpenCore, fix battery readings guide. You need to pacth ACPI. If you only want accurate battery percentages then ECEnabler.kext is only needed.
Battery Status