When you buy a used or refurbished laptop, the battery is usually the part that has aged the most. Most sellers say nothing about it, or call it “good”. We publish numbers instead. Here is what they mean.
Battery health: how much charge it can still hold
Battery health compares how much energy the battery holds when fully charged today with how much it held when it was new (its design capacity). A battery at 85% health stores 85% of its original charge. It still charges to “100%” on screen, but that 100% is a smaller tank than it used to be.
Cycle count: how much it has been used
One cycle is a full 100% of charge used, whether in one go or spread over several days (50% today and 50% tomorrow count as one cycle). Laptop batteries lose capacity gradually as cycles add up, and faster when they spend a lot of time hot or sitting at 100%.
Runtime: what you actually get
Health and cycles describe the battery. Runtime describes the laptop: screen size, processor and settings all change how long a charge lasts. That is why we run the same video-loop test on every laptop and print the result on the listing, for example “ran 6 h 40 m in our test”. It gives you a fair way to compare two units.
Our 80% floor
Every laptop we sell ships with at least 80% battery health. If a battery comes in below that, we replace it before the laptop is listed. The battery is also covered by our 12-month warranty: if it stops charging, won’t hold a charge or swells, we fix or replace it.
Keeping your battery healthy
- Avoid leaving the laptop in hot places, such as a car or in direct sun.
- If you mostly work plugged in, use the charge limit many business laptops offer (often in the manufacturer’s app or BIOS) to stop charging at around 80%.
- Let the battery run down now and then rather than keeping it at 100% all the time.
- Use the original charger or a good-quality one with the right wattage.
Want the exact battery health and cycle count of a unit you are looking at? It is on the listing, and we are happy to send a screenshot of the battery report.
