Today, I am going to talk about three must know about charging your phone. By following these steps, you will have a longer battery life than the others!
PS: Reference is from Apple’s official website and instruction from battery manufacturer, combing experience of mine. Until now, I had used the first iPad version of 2010, iPhone 4s from 2011, and both still have around 80% of battery life without changing new batteries. I think these steps might be really useful!
1. Lithium batteries have no memory effect, and excessive discharge will accelerate the life cycle.
PS: Figure above shows a nickel-metal hydride battery with a low battery memory effect.
According to my experience, “using all the battery before charging your phone” can be said as the first wrong concept. Why will people have this wrong concept? In fact, “battery has memory, charging it before using all up will destroy it”, this is for nickel-cadmium rechargeable battery牧 which is the old fashion rechargeable battery that we used (as the above figure is AA rechargeable battery ). This battery only can be charged when the battery is used up, or the rechargeable amount of energy will be lesser and lesser.
However, smartphones, tablets, laptops, digital cameras, power banks and other product nowadays normally use “lithium battery”. This kind of battery has exactly different properties with the nickel-cadmium battery. The difference is that lithium battery does not have memory, and cannot discharge too much of stored energy. Normally, lithium battery’s life is calculated by “cycle count”, which is the count of charging from (0~100%). In simple, if one lithium battery has a 1000 cycle count of lifespan, in general, it can be charged for 1000 times from 0% to 100%. But in fact, excessive discharged of power will cause damage to the battery due to physical problems. Hence, if you use until 0% to charge, then no matter how many count of cycle count you have for your battery, it might be malfunction more easily.
Therefore, the first rule of using a lithium battery is to charge the battery only when it is used up but to charge it whenever you can. This will lengthen the lifespan of your battery! However, if you normally couldn’t charge it at any time of the day, letting it use up to 0% to charge, it is better for you to buy a power bank. Do not use until its minimum power then charge!
2. You can still plug it on charge when it is full, it’s okay to unplug it before you leave
The second misunderstood concept is that “you must unplug the battery once it is 100%”. I don’t really know how is this happen, but we don’t really need to know how this has spread among all of us tho. In fact, there is an anti-overcharge system no matter in smartphones or laptop. When the battery is fully charged, it will automatically cut off the charging and use the power directly. For example, from the figure above, it can be seen that when the laptop is 100%, MacBook Pro will automatically cut off the charging and turn it into the power adapter, which will maintain until the battery percentage is below 95%. Or please pay attention to the plug icon when the battery is fully charged in iOS6 (if you still have it).
Therefore, there are no worries to not unplug it directly when the battery is fully charged. There might be people wondering “Is it really okay to leave it on the plug?”, about this point…… unless you leave your phone charging for a week, or else please do trust the manufacturer about the anti overcharge system, don’t make yourself crazy thinking about all these!
3. Letting your phone to be less than 40% once every two weeks to maintain the health of the battery
If you had used to all the above steps of charging after reading this article, then you are moving further forward to “longer the lifespan of your battery”! But here, you might need to do one more step, that is once every two weeks, let your phone to be less than 40% to lengthen the lifespan of your battery. At first, we must know that lithium battery is a very picky battery. Letting it keep discharge power will shorten its lifespan, letting it discharge until 0% will also shorten its lifespan, or even not letting it discharge even also will shorten its lifespan!
Due to the physical specification of the lithium battery, which makes if it does not discharge to activate it for a long time, it may shorten its lifespan. But if you continue letting it discharge, it will also shorten its lifespan. Therefore to solve the problem, the best way is to use up the battery below 40% twice a week, (it is okay to use till 30%, but not 0%), and then charge it, hence to maintain the battery health and longer its lifespan! Of course, this is for those who don’t unplug it always, if you always use up the battery power of your electric appliance, then you can ignore this step!
As for the extent to defend whether is the battery “dead”? In fact, two simple steps can be made clear. The first is that the lithium battery will expand as shown above after it dies. Please note that this is not an explosion. This is just a mechanism to remind you that the battery has broken. If your iPhone or other devices suddenly “get fat”, please change the battery! Second, if the battery doesn’t get fat, but your phone obviously has less power stored than before, and you are quite sure that this isn’t caused by background app activating, you are advised to hurry to send it for repair!
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