Power outage appears to have fixed my battery ?!?

[psychlonex]

File this one under wierd...

About 2 months ago, my powerbook (667 g4) battery decided it wasn't going to charge anymore. Not too big of a deal since I rarely use the battery any more, but I searched around to see if it was fixable. I found info on resetting pram, and resetting the power management (think that's what it was called... little button under the keyboard). Neither of these things did anything.

Well last night, we had one heck of a storm. A tree fell up the street and knocked the power out. This morning the power came back on, but we had a broken wire outside our house that was causing the voltage to bounce around (my dad explained it to me, but it's still over my head). With his explanation, I agreed to unplug my computer until the power folks came and fixed our wire. So I plugged her back in this afternoon, and noticed that my adapter was glowing orange!! I let it charge to around 80%, crossed my fingers, and unplugged the adapter. WOOT! She's running off the battery again!

I did a quick "battery" search here but only found folks with dead or dying batteries. Does anyone know what might have happened here? I guess it'd just be interesting to know what exactly went on, why it worked, and would it be possible to reproduce?

thanks!
psx

 

[Lacero]

Sounds like the electricity before the storm was dirty and so your adaptor wasn't able to charge your battery.

Any grow ops around your area?

 

[psychlonex]

Would that theory still make sense if it was charging this morning, before they fixed the broken line? How would you define 'dirty' electricity? I'm guessing a little lower than 120?

I'm assuming you mean weed growin' operations? Not that I know of, but then again that's not the sort of thing folks have going in plain view

Thanks!
psx

 

[SummerBreeze]

Hmm, that is a weird story. I'm sure it's not in everyone's best interests to zap their houses to get their batteries working, but I'm glad it worked for you

 

[p0intblank]

That's pretty awesome! I know nothing about electricity... but uh, congrats.

 

[psychlonex]

Hell yeah. It charged completely. Using IBatt, it says my battery gets a B+, having a capacity of 3.017 Ah. WOOT!

Another thing I forgot to mention was that when I started back up yesterday, my clock had been reset to 12/31/69. Not sure what caused that either but I'm not going to complain.

 

[joker2]

Another thing I forgot to mention was that when I started back up yesterday, my clock had been reset to 12/31/69. Not sure what caused that either but I'm not going to complain.

This piece of information might help explain it.

In theory, when you reset the PRAM before, the clock & date should have reset to this default time then. If it didn't, then the reset didn't "take." Perhaps sometime during this whole ordeal, both the battery ran completely out and adapter did not have any power (for the requisite 4 minutes or whatever the latent memory is), thus resetting the PRAM the 'hard' way...