Dell XPS 13 9350 Replacement Battery: My Experience

The short story:

If you're looking to replace a battery in a Dell XPS 9350, consider a refurbished replacement directly from Dell. They're not available through the website, but if you contact tech support they'll sell you one for $81 plus tax and your old battery. Or $113.17 plus tax if you want to keep the old battery. My refurb came with 53.793 WHr full charge capacity, which is 93.5% of the design capacity (57.532 WHr) and 96% of the marketing specs (56 WHr) for XPS 9350 batteries.

The long story:

About a month ago I decided it was time to replace my laptop battery. My ~2.5 year old Dell XPS 9350 was still meeting my computing needs while plugged in, but the battery was only lasting 90 minutes or so.

The consensus on the web seems to be that a third party replacement battery is the way to go. However, after some research I decided to go with a replacement part directly from Dell. This post is to document my reasoning and experience in case it's useful to others in a similar situation.

As I see it, there are basically four options for replacing a laptop battery:

• a low quality third party battery

• a high quality third party battery

• an original battery sold by a reseller

• an original battery direct from the manufacturer.

Low quality third party batteries seem to run about $50. They're easy to find on Amazon, but I won't distinguish them with a link. They tend to get a fair amount of pretty nasty reviews. Judging from the reviews, I would say a fair number of them are dead on arrival, and that they tend not to hold up very well, with substantial degradation of capacity within 6 months. I was not very interested in replacing my battery every 6 months, so I eliminated those as an option fairly quickly.

I really only found one third party battery seller that seemed to emphasize quality: laptopbatteryexpress.com. I didn't end up buying one from there, so I can't speak from experience about whether it's BS or not, but purely from reading their marketing copy they seemed a lot more trustworthy than most sellers. That comes at a price though, they wanted $110 bucks for a battery. What eventually soured me on them was that they were selling a 51 WHr battery, and the original in my laptop was a 56 WHr.

Original batteries from third party sellers are also easy to find on Amazon. Assuming they are legitimate products, and not illegally labeled knock-offs, I wondered where they got their supply, and if they were likely to be old batteries. Batteries degrade even if they're not being used, so I wasn't excited about buying a two year old battery, even if the number of charge cycles was low. They're also expensive, costing $110.

Our last option is an original battery directly from the manufacturer, in this case Dell. For a while, I thought this wasn't an option at all: the Dell website didn't list any XPS 9350 batteries for sale. However, I was able to buy one by asking their tech support via online chat. Slight catch though: it's a refurbished battery, not a brand new one. Here's what the Dell support agent had to say about what refurbished means:

Me: what does refurbished mean exactly?

Dell: Well, it is not exactly new part. The systems that are returned back to us by the customers who cancel the order or the systems that are shipped back to us due to any sort of cosmetic damage on them, we take the parts out and use them for singular purpose

Dell: So it doesn't mean that the life will be less or it will degrade soon

Dell: But the parts go through rigorous tests before they are made available for sale

Me: so i can expect the battery to perform about as well as the original new battery in my laptop did?

Dell: Absolutely

Installation was a very straightforward process, but I had trouble getting the screws out without stripping them. Doing a little reading after the fact, I think the problem might have been that they were JIS screws, and I was using a Phillips head driver.

On the first boot on the new battery, the Windows battery report (powercfg /batteryreport) showed a full charge capacity of 53.793 WHr. That's 93.5% of the design capacity (57.532 WHr) and 96% of the marketing specs (56 WHr) for XPS 9350 batteries.

The cost of the refurbished battery was $81 plus tax and the return of my old battery. Or $113.17 plus tax if I wanted to keep my old battery. I was satisfied with what I got for the price, given my alternatives. However I also think Dell's claim that the battery life and speed of degradation are the same as with a new battery is inaccurate. It took approximately 10 months of usage on my original battery before it had degraded to the point at which the refurb came out of the box.

The return process was a bit of a hassle. First of all, they didn't tell me ahead of time that they wanted my old battery back. It was mentioned for the first time in an email shortly after I got the final order confirmation (which didn't mention it either). I was annoyed on principle, but mostly didn't care, because what was I going to do with an old dead battery anyway? After I swapped batteries, it became more of an issue (more on that later).

The first annoyance with the return process was that there were no return shipping instructions in the package containing the new battery. For reasons I cannot fathom, Dell's customer service phone reps were also unable to help me figure out where to send the old battery. Return shipping instructions eventually arrived by email 13 days after I received the package.

The second annoyance with the return process came from the fact that my old battery was somewhat swollen:

I've heard that swollen batteries pose a larger fire risk than undamaged batteries, so I was worried that my old battery was unsafe to ship back to Dell. Indeed, guidance published by FedEx Ground says that shipping damaged batteries requires coordination with the FedEx Ground safety department.

So I called Dell to ask if they could either offer their assurances that shipping the battery was safe or relieve me from the obligations to return it. If you're in a similar boat I would not recommend calling Dell. I spent about an hour on the phone with absolutely nothing to show for it. Emailing the address on the return instructions eventually yielded permission not to return it without getting charged for the privilege.

In the end I was reasonably satisfied with my purchase. I got a decent quality battery at a decent price. I think it's a path worth considering if you're in a similar position.