How To Charge A Laptop Battery Without A Laptop Charger?

Imagine this, you are working on your laptop and for some reason, your charger isn’t working. Or you are traveling and forgot your laptop charger. Or your laptop battery is simply isn’t charging. Well, these are some scary scenarios and you must be wondering what to do? For starters, you should know how to charge a laptop battery without a laptop charger. Then there are some other tricky and expensive methods like buying a new battery or buy a new laptop altogether.

Considering the latter options are both expensive and time-consuming, let's stick to how to charge a laptop battery without a laptop charger. In this guide, I am going to show you some effective ways to do it.

Why Do It?

Now you must be wondering, why even charge a laptop battery without a laptop charger? Is it even possible?

So let me get this straight, in an ideal world, you shouldn’t face such a situation. But sometimes the laptop battery won’t charge with the laptop charger. And that is mainly because of battery malfunction. There are a lot of reasons why your battery won’t charge:

Reasons for Battery Malfunction

• Longer Use: Batteries are not made to last an eternity. They use chemicals and other resources to generate electricity. Over time the quality of a battery degrades and that can cause it to not charge efficiently.
• Using the Laptop on High Temperatures: When you perform performance tasks such as editing, gaming, etc., your laptop heats up, and heat for a battery is never good.
• Using Laptop for Longer Periods of Time: If you use your laptop for extended periods of time, and constantly discharge its battery, that can cause malfunction.

So the bottom line is that if your battery is giving you issues and won’t charge with a laptop charger, you will have to find other ways to charge it.

In some cases, you go to a different country and your laptop charger isn’t compatible with the plugs and voltage of that country. In that case, you can’t charge your laptop with your charger so you need another way.

How To Charge A Laptop Battery Without A Laptop

Take a Universal Adapter

Universal adapters are really handy if you are in a different country and your laptop charger can’t plug into their plugs. They can help you in a foreign nation by making your charger compatible with their voltage and plugs.

You can easily find universal adapters online and in the offline markets as well. They are quite cheap too.

Just remember that they are a bit risky so you should only use them when super necessary.

Use USB Type-C Port

Many premium laptops come with USB Type-C ports that support charging. You might have seen Macbooks charging via USB Type-C ports.

Well, if your laptop has a Type-C port, you can definitely use it as a power input source. This comes in handy when you are traveling or you do not have your laptop charger with you.

USB Type-C chargers and cables are easily available everywhere and they are quite affordable too.

The only disadvantage is that the laptops with USB Type-C are expensive and older models do not have Type-C ports.

Using an External Charger

Many laptop manufacturers follow the modular approach for hardware components. This means there are a lot of laptops with removable batteries. If your laptop has a removable battery, you can use an external charger to charge it.

All you have to do is get an external battery charger and then plug out your battery and charge it.

This is however only limited to laptops with removable batteries so it is not the most effective way.

Use a Powerbank or Portable Laptop Charger

Power banks these days are quite powerful and compact so you can use them to get instant battery life on your laptop. It comes really handy when you are traveling. In the absence of a power source, you can connect your laptop. It should give you sufficient time to complete all of your important work and then you can charge it when you reach your destination or have a power source.

Carry Portable Laptop Charger

While travel adapters may help you to plug into a power source in another country, most of them don’t convert the voltage. Meaning if the other country uses a different voltage, you are screwed basically. So you should just keep a portable laptop charger that can adapt to different voltages. This will help you to charge a laptop without a laptop charger.

Solar Charging for Laptop

Let’s say you are going to uncharted lands where you won’t find any charging source. What then? Well, this is where solar charging comes into play. Yes! It’s real! You can now get solar charging kits that can work without any electrical power outlet(of course).

You have to assemble them in the sun and then the solar panels generate electricity to charge your mobile devices such as laptops, smartphones, etc.

For this to work, you obviously need sun and some space to set up the kit. After that, you are all set! People use solar charging kits in remote areas and it is quite effective.

When to Consider Battery Replacement?

The above methods are good if your battery is in good working condition. Some of the methods only work if the battery is removable. But what if the battery itself is at fault? Well, in that case, you need to get it replaced.

A good indicator is if your battery quickly discharges or it heats very quickly. That means the battery needs replacement.

Now obviously you can go for the stock option to get it replaced by the original battery from the manufacturer. But these days you can also get super batteries. They are bigger in capacity, provide better backup and they charge quickly too. Just note that if you replace your laptop’s battery with a super battery, you will have to use the charger provided by them.

Closing Phrase

So that was all about how to charge a laptop battery without a laptop charger. Some of the methods apply only to a particular group of laptops while others can be applied to all the laptops. Just ensure that you keep your battery healthy and do not overcharge it all the time.