Pulled a new battery from my Lenovo laptop and want to store it. Are there any negatives to wrapping the battery completely with something like a plastic wrap like glad wrap?
Just wrap it and put it in its own little plastic zip lock bag
Get it to 40-60% first. Zip lock and into the fridge. Check it every few months.
I’ve had a single 18650 in the freezer going on 2 years to see what happens to it. Some sources say not to freeze….but there are lots of situations where batteries end up in freezing temps for a long time. So far, seems to be pretty much like it’s peers.
You might also want to store the batt at 40% to 60% charge for long term storage. That’s what we do at work when some laptops will sit idle for a few months after the rendering farms are done.
Thanks all for the help! Will lock it away then and test it every 6 months or so to see if it's still alive.
I have 80 laptop pulls stored in my house for the last 3 years and they all still register the same on my DMM as they did when I packed them away. 20 are at 4.12v (emergency earthquake batteries) and the rest are at 3.6v to 3.8v. Personally I wouldn’t bother storing li-ion batteries in a freezer or doing anything special with them.
Higher voltage likely is bad for cycle life but for my emergency batteries that isn’t a concern of mine. All I really care about is that the batteries are mostly fully charged when I need them:)
^ My laptop is one of the newer ones with the crappy long, wide, flat battery.
Being a laptop battery just place it inside a bag or box, store in a cool and dry place and be done with it. Laptop batteries are multi-cell packs attached to battery management circuitry and properly encased, no need to worry. I would store it at no more than ⅔ of maximum SoC, you could even attach a couple wires to the leftmost and rightmost connector pins, and measure the voltage over these wires with a voltmeter; it should be no higher than (number of battery stages × ≈3.92) V for long term storage. The SoC or battery percentage method is :-) probably easier, though. 
Storing in a freezer is probably overkill, but from what I’ve read, storing in a refrigerator may help extend life. Below freezing, there’s not much added benefit. The best thing you can do is store at about 50% charge; temperature is secondary to that.
Even if you store a lithium-ion battery at full charge, it’s still not as harmful as what some of the literature says. I think it used to be bad in the early days of lithium-ion, but batteries are much better now. I have used laptop cells which spent most of the first 10 years of life at 100% charge. They still measure at about 80% capacity, so 20% loss in 10 years ain’t bad. I think the bigger effect might be on internal resistance, so high drain cells might only be medium drain cells after 10 years. We’ll have to wait and see, because high drain cells haven’t been around that long.
From another thread:
I am not an expert at all, so what I got from the article is incomplete. My take away is storing at high voltage is more harmful than at room temperature based on 15 year projections. So any battery not in a flashlight or ready for a light is below 3.8v or 3.7v depending. I will not keep them 15 years, but want them as safe as possible for the time I have them.
Storing above 70% SoCs is projected to result in higher internal resistance over 15 years, which might not be important to heavy users.
There is much information in this study and this quote about SoCs above 80% does not do it justice, but is an interesting starting point:
For SoCs above 80%, an increasing cathode degradation has been observed. This has led to coupled side reactions and a marked increase of the charge transfer resistance of the NCA cathode.
The reason I pulled the battery is that I don't like it always being at 100% charged when I use my laptop, it gets on my nerves. I'd rather just have it removed and be done with. If I go on a long travel somewhere, it only takes about 10 minutes to unscrew the back cover and screw the battery back in. I should have gotten a computer with the easily detachable battery packs, but didn't think of that at the time.
Would you mind sharing one or more pictures of the battery, klrman? I guess it should be some type of multi-cell prismatic battery with built-in protection circuit and a connector to the motherboard, very much like tablet or smartphone batteries, only bigger.
User detachable batteries may be more practical, but the way they're built makes battery restoration a pain in the arse. They feature a microcontroller powered battery management system whose code is not public domain. This makes re-programming the controller a @#$%, something which is a must once the battery gets run down. Together with crazy high OEM battery pack prices it is the main reason behind a widespread third party battery market. I recently bought a 6-cell Acer compatible laptop pack for a friend for which I ended up paying €13.43 thanks to a coupon, and it arrived home in 18 days. You may think this example probably is a bit extreme due to the pack being an old model, but in practice other battery packs do not usually get a lot more expensive. Crazy good.
Hey Barkuti :) here it is
Weird shape. I see that L15M4PC2 pack in AliExpress for as low as €35.60 shipping included, guess it is relatively recent (?) in the laptop market and so no 3rd party packs available right now. Its price isn't terrible, either. Or maybe it is my memories of OEMs asking $100+ for a pack, batteries have become a lot cheaper in the last years.
I see it has a multi-pin connector, must be treated as a conventional laptop battery with propietary microcontroller chip and software. Guess they don't want to get off their high horses in the PC world. In Android batteries don't have an MCU (?) probably because they're single cell and can strictly do without, and if you're root you can have total control over the battery with special software. In the PC world I don't see how are they going to do that, with every battery manufacturer choosing a different battery MCU and their closed software. Piss poor situation, honestly.
Thanks for sharing klrman. 
Thought it was a weird looking battery when I first saw it too. Not sure what the oem battery would cost if I would buy directly from Lenovo, but I almost always have them plugged in and no need for a battery really.
it’s ok but i don;t think it has any benefit either
maybe preventing a short
it will not prevent self discharge, or fire protection if it self ignites
wle
^^ I think these batteries only ignite if they discharge too low and then get charged back up again. Another reason I pulled the battery is that for some reason at random times it would go from 90% to 0% within a week without being used. Anyone know about a stored laptop battery that self discharged and actually ignited without being charged?
A discharged battery isn’t going to explode or catch fire. The energy to do that, is gone.
If you’re not using the laptop battery, it’s probably good to take it out and store it separately. It’s BMS will still likely slowly discharge it, but checking it once a year is probably good enough.
You might need to reinstall it for BIOS updates or stuff like that.
Thanks, thought it would be fairly safe just storing it.