How To Take Care of Your Smartphone Battery the Right Way
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Your
smartphone is a minor miracle, a pocket-sized computer that can fulfill
almost every whim. But none of its superpowers matter a bit if it runs
out of juice. With removable batteries becoming more and more rare,
you've got to take good care of the one you got. Fortunately, it's not
to hard keep the lithium-ion powering your everything machine happy if
you follow a few simple rules.
Obviously,
the first rule for extending your battery life is not using up all your
battery life playing candy crush and walking around with Wi-Fi and GPS
enabled when you're not using either and really, really need
your phone to last that extra hour. But aside from that, there are some
basic rules for care and charging, and they're the simplest baseline for
a healthy battery.
Top it off
You
may vaguely recall hearing something about rechargeable batteries and
the "memory effect." You know, that if you don't "teach" your
rechargeable batteries their full potential by taking them from totally
full to totally empty, they'll "forget" part of their capacity. Well
forget all that. Right now. It's wrong.
Battery memory is a real thing,
but it applies to nickel-based batteries; your trusty sidekick (literal
Sidekick or otherwise) doubtlessly has a lithium-ion battery, and it
needs to be treated a little differently. Specifically, it should be
topped off whenever you get the chance.
To
get the most out of a lithium-ion battery, you should try to keep it
north of 50 percent as much as possible. For the most part going from
all the way full to all the way empty won't help; in fact, it'll do a
little damage if you do it too often. That said, it's smart to do one full discharge about once a month for "calibration,"
but don't do it all the time. Running the whole gamut on a regular
basis won't make your battery explode or anything, but it will shorten
its lifespan.
But! You don't want to have it charging all the time either; lithium-ion batteries can get overheated. Luckily for you, your charger is smart enough to help with this,
and will cut your phone off for a spell once it's full. And to
complicate matters a little further your battery doesn't particularly
like being all the way full either. In fact, your battery will
behave the best if you take it off the charge before it hits 100
percent, and leaving it plugged when it's already full is going to cause
a little degradation.
So
if you're really particular about optimizing your battery's life, you
should try to go from around 40 percent to around 80 percent in one go,
and then back down whenever possible. A bunch of tiny charges isn't as
bad as going from 100 down to zero all the time, but it's not optimal
either.
Keep it cool
It's
easy to worry about bad charging habits thanks to the training we've
had from old rechargeable batteries, but lithium-ion batteries have a
worse enemy: heat. Your smartphone's battery will degrade much much faster when it's hot, regardless of whether it's being used or just sitting around doing nothing.
At
an average temperature of 32 degrees fahrenheit, a lithium-ion battery
will lose six percent of its maximum capacity per year. At 77 degrees,
that number jumps to 20 percent, and at 104 degrees it's a whopping 35.
Sure, it's not exactly practical (or sane) to keep your phone in the
fridge, but it's worth going out of your way to prevent long stays in
hot cars and the like.
Avoid wireless charging
Wireless
charging is can be incredibly convenient if your phone can do it, but
it's not without its disadvantages. The inductive, wireless chargers out
there today have this nasty habit of generating a fair bit of waste
heat. And while wasted energy is just a bummer in general, that heat
will also toast your battery in the process. That's no bueno. It's a
little less convenient, but standard plug-in charging is going to keep
your battery in better shape, especially if you're some place warm to
begin with.
Never go to zero
Obviously,
using your battery is going to make it degrade. But it's going to
slowly die even if you just leave that iPad in the closet for a bit.
There's a trick to minimizing that inevitable aging though: leave it a
little bit of juice.
If
you're going to be shelving any lithium-ion battery for a long time,
try to leave it with at least 40 percent battery power to tide it over.
Lithium-ion batteries don't hemmorage power at 30 percent a month like
nickel-metal-hydride batteries do; they'll lose maybe five to ten
percent of their charge each month.
And
when lithium-ion batteries get too low—like, literally zero
percent—they get seriously unstable, and dangerous to charge. To prevent
explosion-type disasters if you do try to charge one, lithium-ion
batteries have built-in self-destruct circuits that will disable (read:
destroy) the battery for good, if it reaches rock bottom. And
sure, that'll save you from a face full of battery-acid, but it'll also
leave you short one battery.
Don't sweat it too much
It's
easy to get protective of your battery, but it's also easy to get lazy.
And that's fine, because as long as you're not a complete idiot, you'll
be OK. Typically, a lithium-ion battery lasts for three to five years,
and chances are you're going to want to swap out your gadgets sometime
in that window anyway. The slight damage of a technically bad idea like
leaving your phone plugged in all night every night, or using wireless
charging, might be worth the convenience.
Still,
it's pretty easy to keep your battery reasonably healthy just by
avoiding particularly egregious torture like letting your phone
discharge from full to zero every single day, or leaving it in a hot car
all the time. And the next time you make it back home with power to
spare, you'll thank yourself for it.
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