If you are looking for some tips on how to extend your battery life, you are in the right place. Keep reading and you will find out how to extend battery life.
With the development of fast charging (Xiaomi introduced 120-watt charging last year), our phones are quickly ready for all-day use. The fact is, however, that lithium-ion cells in phones will slowly get tired, mostly due to our bad habits and also due to natural degradation.
If you are one of the lucky users who have had the same phone for many years, you have probably noticed that the battery is far from lasting as long as it did in the beginning. What’s more, some phones don’t last a day after a couple of years of use, even phones with larger (5000 mAh +) batteries. Unfortunately, we cannot prevent the natural degradation of the battery. However, some habits can extend battery life.
Partial charging is a healthy habit
The most popular myth about batteries is that you have to completely discharge and recharge them from time to time to erase “battery memory”. This is an outdated myth that led to lead cells. For today’s smartphones with lithium-ion batteries, this is the worst habit that further accelerates battery degradation.
Partial recharging is healthy for lithium-ion batteries and has quite a few positive benefits for longevity. For a better understanding, it is necessary to first understand how the battery is charged. As it approaches full discharge, the lithium-ion battery draws a constant current and operates at a lower voltage. This voltage gradually increases as the battery is charged and equalizes to about 70% charge. Then the current starts to drop until the cell is charged.
Importantly, low voltage operation is good for battery life as it increases the number of available charging cycles before you notice a significant reduction in performance. According to Battery University, about every 0.1 V reduction in cell voltage doubles cycle life. Therefore, charging the phone in the range of 30% to 80% keeps the voltage low and can slightly extend the life of the lithium-ion battery. If this is not practical for you, try to reach a maximum of 90% and start charging your phone before it reaches 20%.
Extend Battery Life With Avoiding Unnecessary Charging
Charging overnight or unnecessarily is a very common habit of users, but is not recommended for several reasons (including the myth of phone overcrowding). First, continuous charging of an already full battery can cause the formation of lithium metal around the anodes of lithium-ion batteries. This reduces the stability of the phone in the long run and can in rare cases cause malfunctions or sudden reboots of the operating system.
Another reason why you should not charge an already charged battery is that the battery is charged at a higher voltage. As already mentioned, this worsens the lifespan. Continuous charging also generates excess heat caused by improper heat dissipation.
Ideally, the device should automatically stop charging at 100%. While some phones have this feature, many phones still pull up to half an ampere or more from the outlet even when fully charged. Even turning off the phone completely does not help in many cases. While this may not seem like a large amount of power, it is still enough to prevent the phone from cooling down to the optimum temperature. It also causes voltage to circulate through the battery, causing a mini cycle.
Parasitic charging is another bad habit of users, especially mobile gamers. This type of load is bad for the battery because it distorts the charge cycle and can cause mini cycles when part of the battery is constantly circulating and thus decaying faster than the rest of the cell. It is even worse when the device is fully charged. Then parasitic charging causes higher voltage and overheating of the device.
The best way to avoid this is to turn off the device while charging. Of course, this is unrealistic for many. Instead, it’s best not to perform demanding tasks such as playing games, creating or editing recordings, or the like if you already need to use the phone while charging. Browsing the web, writing messages and the like is acceptable.
Heat is the eternal enemy of the battery and the phone
In addition to all of the above, temperature or heat is equally crucial for long battery life. In fact, it is the biggest killer of long-term battery health. Like high voltages, high temperatures put a strain on the battery and cause capacity loss much faster than at lower temperatures.
The lithium-ion cell, which is maintained between 25 and 40 degrees Celsius, should retain approximately 85 to 95% of its capacity after the first year with normal charge cycles. Regular excess temperatures above 40 ° C and charging up to or above 100% mean that the capacity may fall to 65% after the first year. An even higher load, above 60 ° C, could reach this mark in just three months.
A battery that is charged and exposed to high temperatures (in the sun, near a radiator…) is the worst case scenario. Do not leave the phone under a pillow or in a car on a hot day while charging. Fast charging technologies are certainly a great addition to any phone, but they bring quite a few problems: higher currents and voltages, which leads to overheating of the phone.
Charger capacities of up to 120 watts quickly become a problem for the long life of the device. Fast charging is recommended for short and fast charging. Numerous tests have revealed that fast charging often exceeds that magical limit of 40 ° C. Leaving the phone to charge quickly for 5 to 15 minutes will not cause major overheating problems. For full charging, it is recommended to use smart functions to optimize the temperature or a slower charger.
How to extend and monitor battery capacity?
Lithium-ion battery technology is well researched today, but bad and untested habits still prevail among the general public. In short, do smaller charge cycles (30 to 80%) and pay attention to the phone temperature.
Turn off unnecessary features (Bluetooth, mobile data…) whenever possible and check which background applications consume the most power.
If you have a newer phone with an OLED screen, you may want to consider using dark mode. Google conducted a study in which they found that the Google Pixel used as much as 63% less energy in dark mode.
Unlike LCD and LED screens, the OLED display has each pixel illuminated separately. Black pixels on the OLED screen do not consume energy at all, and darker colors are significantly less than on other screens. LED and LCD screens consume the same amount of power, whether they display a black, white or color image.
