How You Can Elongate Your Device Battery Lifespan
One of the nagging frustrations of smartphone users is shortness of battery life and battery lifespan. Let me quickly clarify this. Battery life refers to how long your phone battery lasts before running down on energy. On the other hand, battery lifespan refers to many years or month your battery lasts before you ultimately replace it.
I will like to identify two major causes of battery frustrations. It’s either you bought it wrongly or you use it wrongly. You’ll be buying wrongly if you bought your phone at the wrong place—a faceless store where you would easily buy the inferior phones or accessories; perhaps because of price considerations. I’ll tell you more about this later.
The second reason is how you use your phone. Let me focus on this for now. There are few things you need to understand about how you need to use your phones in a way to elongate its battery life and lifespan.
1. Understand How Phone Batteries Work
The bad news is that, as Antonio Villas-Boas of Business Insider, a world-class tech media organization, puts it, “No matter what you do, your phone’s battery capacity — which translates to its lifespan — will degrade as you use it.” Smartphone batteries, like batteries of automobile, laptops, and other electrical devices, have a limited lifespan.
With every full use and full recharge, a lithium-ion battery, used by your phone, degrades slightly. Many battery manufacturers give a phone battery the maximum optimum lifespan at 400 charge cycles. Some cycles are as little as just 100. A cycle refers to a full charge and full discharge—when your phone charges from 0% to 100% and discharges again to 0%.
Get this clear, this doesn’t mean that you can charge your phone 400 times only. There are occasions when you won’t fully charge your phone and most times, your phone will not (must not actually) discharge to zero percent. A charge cycle is reached when your battery meter has absorbed 100% of energy. Let’s say you recharge your battery from 30% to 80%, that’s a half cycle. If you charge next time from 23% to 73%, that’s about another half cycle. You’ve just completed a cycle.
Going by the manufacturers’ claim, after your phone battery has gone through 400 charges, it won’t be able to store more than 80% of the energy it could store originally. If though the battery meter reads, 100%, the energy there will continue to degrade faster with additional charge cycle. Some phone batteries reach this 20% degradation level after just 100 charge cycles.
Understanding this will let you know that if you want to elongate your battery lifespan, you must extend the battery life and reduce the number of time you need to charge. Unfortunately, batteries are meant to be used. And when you use it, the battery is used. You’ll recharge, thus reduce the cycle.
2. Avoid Overnight or Prolonged Charging of Phone
Dominik Schulte, the MD of BatterieIngenieure, a German battery-technology consultancy firm says: “If you’re going to charge your phone to 100% and keep it at 100% — just keep on charging and charging overnight — this will have negative influence on aging.”
As lithium-ion batteries age, their chemistry changes and their efficiency reduces. Lithium-ion batteries don’t like to remain at 100% for a long period. It seems that about 50% is the healthiest range for lithium-ion batteries. Their lifespan shortens if you continue to pump in the electric energy for hours after being fully charged.
In fact, there are debates about the possibility of an explosion if a battery continues to receive energy. You don’t have to allow yourself to have the bad experience that will be used as an experiment.
Smartphone companies such as Apple, LG, and Samsung aren’t bothered about how long your phone stays plugged to electrical power. Why? Google claims that most phones can to shield their batteries from overcharging. That the extra power that comes into the phone doesn’t get into the battery, just like it works for laptop. However, that is for a while. After a constant and prolonged exposure, the protector will cave in and your battery will be damaged. And don’t forget that a laptop is protected from overcharging because it’s being used while still connected to the power source. If not, the battery too will damage.
3. Avoid Exposing Your Phone to Extreme Cold or Heat
It can cause serious damage to your phone battery if you charge it under extreme heat or cold. 17- to 23-degrees C. (62- to 72-degrees F.) is the ideal range. If your phone is directly exposed to a temperature higher than 35 degrees C, (95 degrees F) for long hours, it can permanently damage the battery. So avoid leaving your phone inside your vehicle to be exposed to the sun for too long.
4. Don’t Drain Your Phone Battery Before You Recharge It
As observed earlier, maintain 50 percent as the recharge level of your battery. Don’t let it go lower than 20% capacity and maintain not higher than 90%. Your battery is stressed if you start charging it from zero and such stress reduces its lifespan. This may be good for older batteries, but never for new ones. Thus, try to maintain short charges. Instead, top up your phone for quick charges from time to time.
5. Keep Your Phone Battery at 50% to 80% for Long-term Storage.
If you won’t be using your phone for a long time, charge up to 50% before switching it off. Don’t forget; the phone memory continues to work even after it’s switched off. Thus, the date and time will be correct even when you switch it on again. This means the battery continues to work and can drain to zero. Turn it on after one or two months to charge it again up to 80%, not up to 100 as the load will continue to stress it before being used.
6. Control Apps That Consume Battery
Some apps consume batteries on the phone. Adjust the setting of each app on your phone so that they don’t continue to drain your batteries. Both Android and iOS have several options for this. You need to reduce battery consumption to reduce the number of charge cycles. Also, make sure that you buy premium versions of the apps you use frequently so that you avoid seeing ads that consume battery.
7. Set Your Phones to Energy Saving or Lower Power Modes
Set your device to the energy-saving mode to reduce brightness, volume, screen brightness, and maybe disable certain apps that waste your batteries. This will depend on each phone. This may affect the general performance of the CPU. But it will be a good trade-off for battery longevity on occasions you don’t need your phone to perform all its functions.
In summary: As you’ve seen above, the less the number charge cycle and longevity of charging, the longer the lifespan of your phone battery.
There are a few other tips that can help. But you’ll need the advice and assistance of those experienced in the business of selling and repairing mobile phones so as not to be confused.
You that you’ll get this at reputable phone shops like Top Success stores. Their nationwide shops are a few of those places where you’ll find experts to give you informed advice on further things to do to enjoy your phone batteries.
Don’t forget, the problem may actually start with buying a poor-quality product. No matter the price, you may still not buy the right thing. However, HARDLY would you see a store that will sell any GOOD QUALITY phone for you at a price better than that of Top Success.
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