Do you leave the cell phone charging for a long time? This is how your battery is being damaged!

This has been said a lot and the affirmation is consistent that it is not bad to leave the cell phone charging all night or longer than it should. That you can sleep peacefully and safely because your Android phone is smart and even if it remains plugged into the charger, it can stop the flow of power once the battery is full. Totally true. This can be easily checked by touching the phone and charger the next morning and feeling the temperature of both.

However, it is also true that this habit of leaving the cell phone charging overnight can reduce the useful life of your battery. Battery University, an authority on the subject, has a very complete technical article on extending the life of lithium-ion-based batteries, which are used by virtually all mobile devices today. One of his conclusions is “the worst situation is to maintain a battery fully charged at elevated temperatures’.

If we delve a little into the details of the content, we will see things like discharges and also partial charges “reduce stress and extend battery life.” That is the opposite scenario of charging a device overnight. The battery will charge in one or two hours and the rest of the night it will remain at 100% charge, in a state of “stress” due to the high voltage of a full charge.

“A full state of charge for a long time can be more stressful than cyclicality”, meaning cyclicality is the process of completely discharging the battery on a frequent basis, something that also affects the battery in the long term, because its useful life translates into a limited number of charge cycles, which is usually between 300 and 500.

Instead of charging your cell phone overnight, try to charge it whenever you can, between uses. Don’t worry about memory effect, because that does not exist in lithium ion batteries.

A good rule of thumb is to keep the battery between 20 and 80% of its capacity, something that even Apple partly does on iPhones and that personally it has allowed the battery of my Samsung Galaxy S7 to last three years and four months before swelling and becoming useless. Charging in this way and staying within that 60% discharge could at least double the charge cycles or the life of your battery, compared to if you fully charged and discharged it, something that would make you lose 20% of its capacity. in a year, in a moderate temperature environment, according to Battery University data.

If you cannot avoid leaving your phone charging overnight, you can schedule the power cut after a certain time, to avoid fully charging your mobile. This is done with a timer outlet, which you can get for $ 10-15. in Amazon. In this case you should find out approximately how long it takes your cell phone to charge to 80% to program that time in the socket.

Also exist applications to cut the load, What Battery Charge Limit, which allow stopping the load when reaching a maximum limit, threshold or percentage, but only works on devices with root permissions.

If you usually change devices every one or two years, this probably does not matter to you, because that is the time that a battery usually lasts whose charge is neglected. But if you tend to keep your device for longer, you may want to correct your charging habits, not only because of the degradation of battery capacity, but because it can end up swelling, you will see blackouts, delay when charging or sudden death. In the case of Samsung devices, the Chinese battery replacement (which is the only one that exists and is much inferior to the original battery, sometimes Japanese, sometimes also Chinese) is a short-term solution, because it does not last more than a few months before swelling too.

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