There's nothing like taking a new smartphone out of the box and enjoying the time between charges. After all, the autonomy is really good when we take it home. But after a year or so, battery life starts to decline. What is the cause? There could be many, but to avoid making mistakes, let's put an end to the three big myths about your smartphone's battery.
That's the end of these three myths about your smartphone's battery!
Plugging your cell phone in at night is bad for the battery
A friend – or even a smartphone seller – has probably told you that it is bad for the battery to leave the device plugged in overnight. But, on the other hand, who wants to wake up at 3 am to turn off their cell phone?
Calm. Your phone's battery is smarter than you think. When you turn on your smartphone at night, the lithium-ion battery begins to slowly recharge until it is full or “saturated” at 4.1 volts. Then it turns off.
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Therefore, if the charger is working correctly, it is impossible to “overcharge” the cell phone battery beyond its limit of 4.1 volts. But is it bad for the battery to be fully charged for long periods of time? That depends on what you expect from a cell phone battery.
If someone wants to keep a battery forever then they can call it overcharging. But with a consumer product like a smartphone, people don't care about battery life. In two or three years, the glass breaks, you buy a new one and the old battery still has some useful life left.
Technologies with a longer lifespan, like satellites and electric cars, are a different story. In this case, engineers have to take special precautions to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries. Rechargeable batteries in electric cars, for example, do not charge to 100% of their total capacity nor do they run down to zero.
This way, there is no need to wake up at night and turn off your fully charged cell phone. The objective of charging a smartphone is to maximize the time of use before plugging it back into the power supply. In the morning, your cell phone must be 100% ready to last all (or almost all) the day.
Allow the battery to fully discharge between charges
Like a mechanical device that wears out more quickly with intensive use, depth of discharge (DoD) determines the number of battery cycles. The smaller the discharge, the longer the battery life. If possible, avoid complete discharges and charge the battery more frequently between uses.
Heat doesn't hurt
In fact, heat is a much bigger threat to battery longevity than your charging practices. Leaving your cell phone on a sunny window sill or on the dashboard of your car is a sure way to run out of capacity.
Interestingly, the combination of excessive heat and a full charge can be problematic if you store a lithium-ion battery for a long time between uses. A battery stored at 100 percent charge at 40 degrees will lose 35 percent of its total capacity over the course of a year. Under the same conditions, a battery stored with an initial charge of just 40 percent will lose just 15 percent of its capacity after three months.
This is why people in the battery industry store and ship batteries at controlled temperatures and never fully charged.