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Every time a company like Apple or Samsung brings out a new phone, they claim the battery life is better than ever and you’ll get so much more usage out of your device. Then tech reviewers get hold of them and run all kinds of tests before proclaiming that they’ll manage about a day or so. Maybe two if you don’t push most of the features. Inside the vast majority of smartphones, tablets and all your other electronic gadgets are lithium-ion batteries which contain an anode, a cathode and a chemical electrolyte. When the phone is being used, charge is pushed from the positive cathode through the electrolyte and attracted to the anode before flowing out to the different components of the phone. Once you’re plugged in and charging, this process is reversed.
But irrespective of how big your phone’s battery is or how new the device is, there are still a few myths that continue to do the rounds. Let’s dispel three of the biggest right here.
Myth 1 – Plugging in overnight is bad for your phone’s battery
This is a popular one. Plenty of people have said that leaving your phone plugged in all night will overcharge and diminish the quality of the battery. Not true. In fact, the batteries inside your phone are programmed to switch off when the charge gets to 100% or 4.1 volts. After it gets to that level, you may as well have your phone sitting on a shelf entirely unplugged as there’s nothing flowing into it. So by all means plug your phone in every night and don’t worry about those four or five hours where it’ll be sitting at 100% – that’s what it’s designed to do.
Myth 2 – Run your battery down completely before charging it up
There’s no need to wait until your phone dies before plugging it in. It’s actually better to charge up your device a little bit at a time throughout the day, if you can. Having your device sit at between 40% – 80% is the ideal sweet spot according to experts on battery tech. Cadax, a company that offers devices that test smartphone and other batteries, runs a free educational website called Battery University. In it they suggest keeping your battery at this optimal level: ‘Similar to a mechanical device that wears out faster with heavy use, the depth of discharge (DoD) determines the cycle count of the battery,’ the site reports. ‘The smaller the discharge, the longer the battery will last. If at all possible, avoid full discharges and charge the battery more often between uses.” The DoD means how much energy a battery has produced – if it’s fully charged then the DoD is 0%. If it’s at 70% charge then the DoD is at 30%. However, the site does recommend letting your phone drop down to 0% and then recharged fully every once every 3 months to help calibrate it.
Myth 3 – Heat Won’t Affect Your battery
It’s hard to believe it in the middle of winter, but heat is actually more of a problem to your phone’s battery than overcharging it is. If you leave your phone in a brightly lit spot – like on a windowsill – then you’re going to find the battery drains quicker. Operating temperature of smartphones according to their manufacturers’ environmental guidelines is around 32 to 95 degrees fahrenheit. In celsius that’s between 0-35 degrees.
