yoga 910 battery not charging

[SimonDA]

I noticed something interesting on my 910. If I plug in my Lenovo charger, I get "plugged in and not charging" every time irrespective of the conservaton mode setting and current level of charge. As previously stated, my off brand phone charger works fine-but slow. Here is what is interesting. If I have the phone charger plugged in and it begins to charge and then I remove it and quickly plug in my Lenovo charger, it charges just fine-all the way to 100%. This issue has something to do with the initial sensing of the yoga charger. No clue how to fix this, but it is additional insight none the less.

Anyone?

[James_Whitcomb]

When I was in the Navy we often ended up repairing electronics using the easter egg approach, just swapping out parts untill the faults cleared.  There are probably alot of potential culprits for causing these problems.  My first thought was an out of tolerance component triggering the system board to not allow charging. If they actually changed my sytem board the number times Best Buy claimed they did (twice) I am suspecting it isnt the systemboard, that leaves a couple ofther boards and the battery. All the computers I have had in the past allowed line current to power the computer regardless of the state of the battery (maybe that isn't the case with the 910). That leaves the two boards (USB C on the left and the board on the right). I don't suppose it is a software glitch since they would have probably isolated that and I did a factory reset with no additional software and the problem was still there. 

[EricDush]

My issue was resolved by sending to Lenovo and they replaced the main board and the battery.  But before I sent it in, I observed exactly the same scenerio of charging where if I used my cell phone charger, it would charge slowly and if I swapped out with the Lenovo charger, it would still keep charging... one additional detail I observed is that it would continue to show power/charge until the Yoga went into sleep mode, after that, it would return to the previous behavior of not charging with the Lenovo charger (or a couple of other 45W chargers I tried including a Targus).

[Kamin1]

Eventually, I ended up wiping the computer clean and reinstalling Windows 10 and apps from scratch.  I left off most of the Lenovo apps just to keep it clean and updated all drivers.  A clean reinstall did it for me.  I finally have no issues charging the battery.  But, I do use a 65W HP adapter which is better than the adapter that Lenovo provides.  The only open issue is that this unit turns itself on from sleep mode with the slightest pressure when in the laptop bag.  I always have to shutdown or hibernate to keep it from doing that. 

[SimonDA]

Thanks for the reply. I am not suprised by this. I have thought that this is a software issue for some time. I think there very well could be a strange interaction between Windows 10 and Lenovo battery management features. There is some type of sensing that goes on when you plug in a charger and that process is messed up. I am praying that Lenovo will get tired of getting laptops back for this issue and will have an engineer look into it and will issue a SW update of some type. It would be extremly difficult for me to do a clean windows install. Hours of pain/down time so I will use my phone charger for a bit of time and will hope it is addressed. If not, this is my next step as I would rather rebuild it than send it in for a repair and not see it for a month or more.

[EricDush]

FYI, a full system clean re-install using the Lenovo USB recovery method did NOT fix the problem for me. I had to send it in to get the motherboard and battery replaced.

[SimonDA]

Thanks for the reply. Very strange how there are so many different solutions to this issue and some work for some people and not for others.

[EricDush]

I was pretty convinced it was a software issue at first also since it seemed to start for me after a series of windows updates and a couple driver updates last October. But after a couple months of rolling back drivers and updates and then finally a full system wipe and re-install using the Lenovo USB build and a week of setting things back up, the problem was still present (it did seem to happen less often... for the first week). But within a couple weeks it was back to the same issue of only charging coming out of standby if I used a low power phone charger. I kept waking the laptop up and having a 10% battery, which the phone charger couldn't even hold at 10% under usage. So I had to break down and send it in to Lenovo. THREE WEEKS from that decision, I had my laptop back and fixed. :/ Since I've gotten it back with the new mobo, I have had weird slowdown issues every once in a while where the whole system just grinds down until even the mouse freezes and I have to reboot. Never experienced that before the mobo swap, but so far, it hasn't been enough of an annoyance to warrant further investigation. It only seems to happen after the computer has been asleep for a long period of time and I left a bunch of Chrome tabs open.

[Kamin1]

As others said, it is interesting the varied replies of different results.  In my recent comment, I did not specify that I purposely did not use the Lenovo recovery option.  I did a clean wipe which means not using any OEM recovery processes.  That worked for me.  I also did it for two other people, and it worked for them as well.  It may not work for everyone, but I avoid warranty repair as much as possible unless I know for sure it is hardware related.  Often, Lenovo takes a long time or they use refurbished parts (or a refurbished replacement).

[James_Whitcomb]

I wipe hardrive mine and reintalled the OS and did the upgrades and still had the problem. How did you conduct your reinstall?