OK, seriously, did anyone think that their Asus Eee PC warranty would cover damaged by third party peripherals? Last month, high capacity batteries for the Eee PC started showing up on eBay. These 10400mAh batteries have twice the capacity of a standard Eee PC battery, meaning your laptop should run twice as long on battery power. And the batteries are reasonably priced at $60 to $100 — while Asus plans to charge $99 for its 6-cell 7800mAh battery whenever the company actually gets around to releasing it.

But there’s been at least one unconfirmed report of a 10400mAh battery exploding while charging and causing damage to an Eee PC. And that’s led to an unconfirmed report that Asus refused to repair the computer. But you know what? I really wouldn’t blame them. And in fact, DigiTimes reports that the company says if this did happen, the damage would not be covered by the warranty.

So a word of caution. If you’re going to buy a third party battery, you might want to keep an eye on your Eee PC while it’s charging, unplug it if it’s getting unreasonably hot, and oh yeah, wait until you’ve read a few thousand reports from happy customers before picking one up. Or you could just wait for Asus to release their overpriced 6 cell battery.

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2 replies on “Shocker: Asus warranty doesn’t cover exploding 3rd party batteries”

  1. Given what I am presently learning about batteries in class, and how weedy the power supply of the EEEPC is, it doesn’t surprise me at all that plugging in a much higher capacity than would have been designed for is causing this sort of catastrophic failure.

    Power systems are one of those areas of electronics that suffers from “Anything I don’t understand is simple and easy” syndrome. A good, stable, non-explosive power supply is actually a damn tricky thing to accomplish and it’s pretty easy to screw things up by randomly changing certain variables. (I’m pretty confident that the higher capacity battery I put in my MP3 player does not in fact charge fully because the factory charging control was probably preset for a 1700 mAh battery)

  2. It’s kinda funny because I sent an email to that Ebay “Taiwan” battery vendor asking them if they warranty damage to the EEE PC caused by their battery and they told me “No, we only warranty the battery, sorry.”

    That was all I needed to know. I am hoping Asus moves its ass on the 6cell because I’m wanting more “off-the-grid” time.

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