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| Phone battery night terrors |
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| PerranOak:
Coming from a time when the best thing to do with a battery was to drain it fully and then charge it up to 100%, I am now confused. I am told, on the Internet, that now it is best (for phones) to drain them to about 40% and then up to about 80%. I guess this is right? My next question is should I turn the phone off at night? Will this help to keep battery health high? Cheers. |
| jpanhalt:
Your original information was wrong. I suspect you are referring to NiCd batteries. Even before NiCd's, we had and still have lead acid batteries. Draining either of those battery types completely before charging was bad. NiCd's were noted to have "memory." That is, if you repeatedly discharged 10% of the available charge, then available charge got less More recent lithium based batteries are more finicky. EDIT: But don't have memory. As I recall, that memory effect was first noticed in satellites. It really was not something that plagued the casual user. |
| golden_labels:
Lithium-ion batteries should not be discharged below 3V. Which is not a concern of you as the user, as the control circuitry will report it as 0% much earlier, and will cut if off completely if it ever goes near that value. The only concern is, theoretically, keeping the battery at its maximum volatege (4.2V) constantly. So there is a grain of truth in “don’t charge above 80%”. But you would need to carefully plan charging through the entire lifespan of your phone to prevent that, while risking it will run out of juice when you need the phone most. So hardly worth the effort.(1) Turning the phone off while unused will of course reduce energy use and wear in general: nothing to do with li-ion cells in particular. NiCd batteries didn’t have memory effect either in normal use. The effect was only present in very rare scenarios not found in consumer gear and wasn’t an actual drop in capacity, but a perceived one due to not charging the battery fully. (1) Said by a person, who does that out of habit. Unless I need something to contain maximum charge, I disconnect devices as soon as I see they are fully. But that’s more satisfying my brain than actually changing something. |
| SiliconWizard:
Note that these days, software on many mobile devices already takes care of that - usually through some options. So you can set the charge to stop below 100%. And, you get a low batt warning when it goes below 20%. But does keeping the SoC (assuming the SoC is correctly estimated, to begin with) between 20% and 80% really increase battery life? While going too low or staying at the max voltage for too long will reduce battery life, if you're doing neither of those extremes, is the above going to change anything? Not really sure. And, if you're always between 20% and 80% SoC, aren't you using only 60% of the rated capacity (which - I know it's obvious - but is not that far from just half of its capacity!)? So, you get the inconvenience of having to charge almost twice as often for a given use pattern. Up to you to define if that's worth the trouble. |
| Halcyon:
Use the phone as you need and just plug it in and forget about it until you need to take it off the charger. The phone will take care of the rest. This has been the case since even back when the Nokia 5110 was around. --- Quote from: PerranOak on February 22, 2022, 08:11:42 am ---My next question is should I turn the phone off at night? Will this help to keep battery health high? --- End quote --- It makes no difference. |
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