Need some battery life tips? These are the facts and habits you need to maximize your phone battery’s longevity.
Most of us — casual users and enthusiasts alike — are forever searching for smartphones with the longest battery life. And while fast charging keeps us topped up every day, the absence of replaceable batteries means eventually, the lithium-ion cells enclosed in our phones are going to age and deteriorate, making it harder to maximize battery life.
If you’ve held onto a phone for a couple of years, you’ve probably noticed the battery doesn’t seem to last as long as it did when your handset was brand new. Four or five years down the line, many phones struggle to make it through the day on a single charge. Holding onto a phone even longer can even spell trouble for reliability too as you may face sudden shutdowns.
Unfortunately, battery capacity inevitably declines with age. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to prolong the lifespan of your smartphone’s battery. If you’ve ever wondered what the best way to charge your battery is, here are some scientifically proven tips to maximize battery life.
Partial charging is a healthy habit
One particularly persistent battery myth is that you need to occasionally fully discharge and recharge to erase “battery memory.” This couldn’t be more wrong for lithium-ion batteries. It’s a leftover myth from lead-acid cells, and it’s pretty undesirable to charge your modern smartphone in this way.
Partial charging is just fine for lithium-ion batteries and can have some positive benefits for cell longevity. To understand why it’s important to appreciate how a battery charges. Li-ion batteries draw constant current and operate at a lower voltage when closer to empty. This voltage gradually increases as the cell charges up, leveling off at around a 70% charge before the current begins to fall until the capacity is full.
Partial charging is just fine for lithium-ion batteries and even has some positive benefits.
Notably, operating at a low voltage is good for a battery’s lifespan, increasing the number of available charging cycles before you’ll start to see a significant reduction in capacity. Roughly speaking, every 0.1V decrease in cell voltage doubles the cycle life, according to Battery University. Therefore, charging up your phone in that 30% to 80% range keeps the voltage lower and might slightly prolong the battery’s lifespan.
Smaller but regular top-ups are much better for Li-ion batteries than long full charge cycles.
Using up just 20% of your battery between charges isn’t practical, but topping up when you’ve used about half will see an improvement in your battery life over the long term. Especially if you avoid charging up to full each time too. The bottom line is that smaller, regular top-ups are better for Li-ion batteries than long full charge cycles.
Avoid idle charging
Charging overnight or in a cradle during the day is a very common habit, but it’s not recommended for several reasons (the old “overcharging” myth isn’t one of them). First, continuous trickle charging of a full battery can cause plating of the metallic lithium, which reduces stability in the long term and can, in rare cases, lead to system-wide malfunctions and reboots. Secondly, as we just mentioned above, it leaves the battery at a higher stress voltage when at 100%. and most important, it creates excess heat caused by wasted power dissipation.
Some phones disable or slow down charging when nearing full capacity.
Ideally, a device should stop charging when it reaches 100% battery capacity, only turning the charging circuit back on to top up the battery now and again — or at the very least reducing the charging current to very small amounts.
While some phones disable charging once full, many continue to pull up to half an amp and sometimes more from the wall outlet. Turning smartphones off doesn’t make a difference in many cases either. While this isn’t a massive amount of power, it’s going to stop your phone from cooling down as quickly and will continue to cycle through a small part of the battery, resulting in a mini-cycle.
A final point worth mentioning is parasitic load. This occurs when the battery is being drained significantly at the same time as being charged, such as watching a video or gaming while charging.
Parasitic loads are bad for batteries because they distort the charging cycle and induce mini-cycles — where part of the battery continues cycles and deteriorates faster than the rest of the cell. Voltage stress and heat on the battery.
Gaming or videos while watching charging is bad because it distorts charging cycles.
The best way to avoid parasitic loads is to turn your device off while charging.But that’s not really realistic. Instead, it’s best to keep the workload light
while the device is plugged in, leaving it idle most of the time. Browsing the web is probably fine. Also, remember to unplug it once the battery is topped up enough.
Heat is the enemy of long battery life
Along with all of the above, temperature is an equally key contributor to longevity and maximizing battery life . In fact, it’s arguably the biggest killer of long-term battery health. Like high voltages, high temperatures stress the battery and make it lose capacity far more quickly than when kept at lower temperatures.
How to maximize smartphone battery health long-term
Lithium-ion battery technology is well understood these days, and smartphones are built around our use cases, but bad habits and myths still permeate the public consciousness. While most of these habits won’t severely negatively impact your phone’s battery life in the medium term , the decline in removable phone batteries means we should take extra precautions to maximize battery life and thus our smartphone’s longevity.
Broadly speaking, smaller regular charge cycles and keeping your phone cool are the key things to remember. Although I should point out that different phone batteries will always age differently depending on how we treat them.