After finding out that 2 old SOLVINDEN lamps died because of a faulty switch and fixing them, I was curious how does the battery hold up after so many years.
Ikea recommends to replace the battery after 2 years, but I never did. All the batteries in the lamp are made in China, but the batteries they sell in the store are made in Japan, so they are different. So let’s put them to the test.
From left to right:
- From ~2015 – failed switch
- From ~2014 – failed switch
- From ~2014 – all ok.
- From 2025 – all ok.
The first lamp spent it’s ~10 years of life in my parent’s garden in Romania, the rest of the 3 lamps are on my terrace in Belgium.
Battery results using the BC700 battery charger (batteries in the same order as lamps):
So the capacities for the batteries are:
- 524 mAh instead of 750
- 730 mAh instead of 750
- 631 mAh instead of 750
- 792 mAh instead of 800
This shows that we have a battery with a significant drop and 2 with a better capacity maintenance (the last one is new, so we don’t count it). I take this as quite good results, as the 3 old batteries are around 10 years old each, so they went through 3000-4000 cycles. This shows greatly positive results, since I experienced a higher failure rate for batteries I used indoors, which did not last anywhere near that much, both in time and cycles.