5-6 hours battery life. Normal?

Hi !

I’m a happy owner of a new OP-1 for a month, and it seems to have a battery issue.

According to various feedbacks, it should have a battery life of approximatively 10-15 hours, and mine is more around 5-6 hours even after an all night charge on an iPad 15W charger.
(I am mainly playing it with headphones)

Does anyone got the same thing ?

I want to know if it is normal, or if I should return it…

Thanx !

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Does your op-1 actually turn off after 5-6 hours, or does the battery meter just indicate that it is low/dying? I have had my op-1 on the last blinking light for a loooonnngg time before it actually died (several days). You can’t trust the LED meter.

Mine will sometimes have that amount of battery after a “full” charge, or what the indicator says is full. It seems turning it on and off frequently drains the battery the most from what I can tell. One way I’ve helped this is to leave it on until the battery dies, and without switching the power switch do a full charge. It usually makes mine last the typical 15 hours or so, but occasionally goes back to a few hours batter life if I charge when not very low or dead. Or if I plug into the computer via USB and don’t turn off the charge feature it will normally does it will mess with the battery life.

I know you can’t trust the LED meter :sweat_smile:

No, my OP-1 actually turns off by itself.
I made only 3 full recharges for the moment.

Does someone here got a more than 10-hour batterie life with headphones plugged in, rather than external powered speakers ?
May it be the fact that I’m using headphones, so the OP-1 has to power them too ?

headphones don’t require power to work or draw power at all for that matter

the difference in battery life between speakers and headphones would be negligible

the OP1 itself is drawing the same amount of power
whether it is plugged into a speaker or a headphone or whatever

if your fully charged OP1 is turning off after 5-6 hours
i would say the battery has prob seen better days

mine still gets like 12-20 hours on a single charge and i’ve had mine for a loooong time.

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Thanks, man !
It confirms what I thought…
I’ll try it again a couple of times, just to see, then I will ask for a return if it doesn’t get better.

A week ago I finished a track on a single charge. Turned it on three times. Together it must have been much more than 10 hours. It’s almost 8 years old.
Thinking about that I still can’t believe it. It’s incredible.

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i went on a 2 week tour on a single charge.
used it every night at the show and a bunch during the day noodling around
came home, switched it on and still had some juice left to jam

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What an amazing stamina you all got !
Mine is not even the half of yours…
This was one of the various reasons I finally clicked the « add to cart » button.

I emailed Thomann to see how I can proceed, we’ll see…

Do you have it connected to a charger all the time?
I never did that and it could be a reason for the loss of capacity.

Nope. Only plugged to charger when empty.

Hmm :thinking:

I suspect the problem is that it’s not fully charging. I apologize if you already know this from newsgroup/FAQ/etc (and rte1023 said this already), but… The OP-1 battery life/charge monitoring is buggy. The best way to use it seems to be:

  1. leave it running as long as possible to kill the battery. Don’t turn it off, let it drain by dying. (I think I put it on a looped playback until it was dead.)
  2. charge it up until it is full. Don’t turn it off, make sure it stays on while it’s charging.
  3. unplug it once it’s full and use it but don’t use the charger while using it.

If you charge it without it being fully drained and/or charge it while using it, the charge detection circuit seems to “lose” capacity. I’ve been doing the above method since I learned about it, and the battery life lasts a very long time. And I often go months between turning it on and using it - and it still keeps an amazing amount of charge. And I only use headphones.

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do NOT use an iPad charger. It even says on the manual not to use chargers with “inappropriate voltages” meaning anything other than a 5V 1A adapter. Might use a half amp to be safe. The OP1 is really sensitive to high voltages.

current and voltage are two different things.
voltages = volts. current = amps.

an ipad charger would be 5V and is the appropriate voltage.
pretty much all devices are really sensitive to higher voltages
than they are designed // rated to run at.
over voltage is one of the easiest ways to kill an electronic device.

any device only draws as much current as it needs.
doesn’t matter if your power supply can supply half an amp (0.5 amps) or 1000 amps
if it only needs 0.1A to run it will only draw 0.1A from the power supply.

if u use a power supply that is rated less than or equal to the amount of current your device desires
then u actually run the risk of overworking your power supply, which may then overheat, damaging the power supply, damaging your device, maybe even starting a fire.

a higher current supply is actually safer because it will be able to do the same job more efficiently with less stress on its components. less stress = less heat = less chance of danger.

i know ur intentions are good but spreading misinformation and half truths on topics that u may not fully understand doens’t really help anyone.

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After a long restoration of my OP-1, I also changed the battery for this one (a random 605070 size, It’s a little bit bigger than the original one). After that, even on a full charge, the sensor showed the status as 1/5 and blinked constantly.
Using the method described above, I corrected the readings, now the status is shown more adequately and the charge of my new battery lasted a little more than 26 hours in the loop playback mode until it was turned off.

Yesterday, I let my OP-1 charge for 24 hours straight on a USB port of my PC after battery went dry, and… …only 2 dots are lit. :laughing:Definitely weird !

Have had my OP-1 for nearly 7months now and have only needed to charge it once

I’ve had similar symptoms. You’re using wrong cable or wrong power brick to outlet. I switched and it fixes it