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New smartphone? Great! Now don’t charge it past 80%
Home » Forums » Newsletter and Homepage topics » New smartphone? Great! Now don’t charge it past 80%
- This topic has 59 replies, 27 voices, and was last updated 4 years ago.
AuthorTopicB. Livingston
AskWoody MVPApril 12, 2021 at 1:06 am #2356825Viewing 27 reply threadsAuthorReplies-
Alex5723
AskWoody PlusApril 12, 2021 at 2:43 am #2356849The iPhone charges to 100% but it optimize charging first up to 80%.
With iOS 13 and later, Optimized Battery Charging is designed to reduce the wear on your battery and improve its lifespan by reducing the time your iPhone spends fully charged. When the feature is enabled, your iPhone will delay charging past 80% in certain situations. Your iPhone uses on-device machine learning to learn your daily charging routine so that Optimized Battery Charging activates only when your iPhone predicts it will be connected to a charger for an extended period of time. The algorithm aims to ensure that your iPhone is still fully charged when unplugged.
Optimized Battery Charging is on by default when you set up your iPhone or after updating to iOS 13 or later. To turn off the feature, go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health > Optimized Battery Charging…
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Alex5723.
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rlesser1
AskWoody PlusApril 12, 2021 at 3:55 am #2356859Thanks to Brian for his excellent review.
One item I don’t see covered however is the situation many of us have, particularly now: we may be at our home desks all or most of the time so that it is convenient to just leave a smartphone plugged in and charging. I went through the Battery University papers, which mostly cover the situation of a fairly extensive discharge followed by partial or full charges.
What if you are mostly at 90-100%, occasionally discharging to 70-80% on an iPhone, for instance? You can’t, at least not without a lot of effort, stay at around 80%. It isn’t clear to me what the wear on the battery would be if it stays at 100% most of the time, since the phone automatically cuts of charging then. The BU articles don’t seem to cover the possibility of being mostly at full charge, unless I missed one.
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doriel
AskWoody LoungerApril 12, 2021 at 5:07 am #2356890It was with Li-Ion batteries, where repeated charge from lets say 99 to 100 % could lower the battery life. Maybe Apple is trying to reduce this risk, by letting phone charge only to 80%. Some people from our company came with their iPhones, that they are broken and they cant fully charge
it takes some adjustment (optimize charging as Alex wrote) to let the phone charge fully. Does Apple still use Li-Ion batteries? I think there are som hours, during which the full charge is available, becase iPhone says:
To reduce battery aging, iPhone learns from your daily charging routine so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need to use it.
What does it mean? I have no clue.
It used to be that letting your phone reach 0% battery and then charging it back to 100% was the best way to keep your battery efficient. While this was true back in the day, the batteries in smartphones now work very differently.
Source:
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doriel.
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anonymous
GuestApril 12, 2021 at 7:42 am #2356911On my MacBook, Apple automatically reduces the maximum charging capacity to prevent charging the battery all the way to 100%. That way, even if I leave the laptop plugged in all day, I in theory should not have to worry about having to unplug it in order to keep the battery at 80%—the device does this for you. My MacBook is about a year old and CoconutBattery reports the maximum battery capacity to be at 85% of its design, which I presume is partly attributed to the MacBook automatically lowering the charge capacity to that number. As the battery ages, the Mac automatically reduces the charge capacity as needed so that it is never at 100% of the battery’s current capacity.
I believe iPhones have a similar feature. iPhones will keep the battery at 80% until it knows that you’re about to unplug it and use it for the day, at which it will then charge to near 100% to maximize battery life. That way you can avoid keeping the battery at 100% for too long while still topping it off at the last minute to maximize battery life during the day. However, I don’t actually own an iPhone (yes, I’m a Mac+Android person, which is a rare combo these days), but this is what I gather.
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lmacri
AskWoody PlusApril 14, 2021 at 11:10 am #2357596It isn’t clear to me what the wear on the battery would be if it stays at 100% most of the time, since the phone automatically cuts of charging then. The BU articles don’t seem to cover the possibility of being mostly at full charge, unless I missed one.
I have the same question about laptop Li-ion batteries. I understand why it’s not a good idea to repeatedly charge a Li-ion battery to 100%, allow it to discharge down to 20% or so and then re-charge back to 100%, but what about a laptop that is essentially used as a desktop computer and is left plugged in the entire time the laptop is turned on? Does this degrade the life of the battery, or is it better to stop charging at 80% if the laptop is always plugged in?
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doriel
AskWoody LoungerApril 12, 2021 at 5:59 am #2356902I think if you change your charging scheme now, at least you wont “damage” your battery anymore. Its not too late, but I think you cant “repair the damage already done”.
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anonymous
GuestApril 14, 2021 at 7:22 pm #2357727I’ve found a cheap solution by accident: I’ve bought a very very very cheap car charger for my phone, and it brought an orange colored USB cable that is so bad and has so much internal resistance the phone barely charges up – a but more than 1 hour with a regular charger but with this cable it takes more than 5 hours!
This cable doesn’t supply enough charge for the phone to be used as a GPS on the car. At first I thought the charger was cheap and bad and bought another charger but ended using the same cable with the same result, reaching the conclusion that the problem was the cable – verified when I started using another cable.
So I leave the phone next to me, connected to the computer on a very slow charging (not warming up, which is great) and I have the time to react and avoid it to fully recharge.
That cable is so bad that it is actually so good!
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Patricia Grace
AskWoody PlusApril 19, 2021 at 9:43 pm #2359018I have a four-year-old Android phone and have always charged overnight to 100%. Is it too late to mend my ways?
May I ask what phone? I fully expected to keep my last android longer, but the battery life was dropping at an alarming rate and I can’t easily charge when I’m out. It was an LG G6. I just bought a Pixel 4a 5G and I’m hoping to keep it for the three years that the OS is supported with updates, but if battery life tanks then my plan will fail!
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Paul T
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bbearren
AskWoody MVPApril 12, 2021 at 7:49 am #2356930If you’ve been blasting your battery to 100% every night, after a year or so your device lasts far fewer hours on a charge.
Not in my experience. Every cell phone I’ve ever owned has been plugged into a charger overnight and charged to 100%. In a couple of decades, I’ve bought only one replacement battery, for a Microsoft Lumia 950 after five years of daily use. The screen developed intermittent issues a few months ago, so I’ve changed over to the spare I bought a couple of years ago.
I don’t have a need for a new smartphone nor, in my experience, any reason not to charge the battery fully. My anecdotal evidence tells me I have ~five years of quite useful battery life left.
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geek
AskWoody LoungerApril 12, 2021 at 9:11 am #2356956I have used Android BatteryBot Pro for 2 years on a 6-year old Oneplus One (battery not replaceable). Several features make it a great app. You can set quiet alarms for ‘rising above 80%’ (bird chirp) and ‘falling below %60’ (low tone). I added alarms every 5% for missed alarms. The alarm for 90% is a hundred birds! Added bonus: a small circle widget with a large % number which can be seen at a glance, and tap it for setting, history etc. There are settings for details in the notification area and % in the status bar. (in image 8° is from Weawow app)
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PeterR
AskWoody PlusApril 12, 2021 at 9:31 am #2356973Here is my really geeky solution for Android. It is not as hard to do as it sounds, but also not for the technically challenged.
- Get a copy of Tasker from the Play Store, if you don’t already have it. It is amazing how much you get for the money. Set up a task to send an HTTPS request with the string from IFTTT (more below). Set up a profile to trigger the task when the battery is at 80%. Make another profile and task for when the battery is at 75%
- Get a “smart plug” or “wifi plug” and plug your charger into it. Get one that works with IFTTT, which almost all of them do. I use the Wyze Smart Plug because it is cheap ($15-$20 for two). Set it up with your wifi network. Create an account; using their app is optional.
- Get a free account with IFTTT, if you don’t already have one. Connect your wifi smart plug account with your IFTTT account, so that IFTTT can turn the plug on and off. Create your own IFTTT “applet” to turn the plug on, and one to turn it off. These are very simple applets that say “if Maker Event XXXXX then turn PlugXXX off”. Get the API and HTTP string for this event (it is really hard to find this string; look under “webhooks”). Then put IFTTT’s POST/GET request strings into the Tasker Web Request tasks you created on the phone.
Now, you can plug your phone in all night or all day. When it reaches 80% (or whatever you set), Tasker will send a message to IFTTT which will send a command to the wifi plug to turn off the charger. Later, Tasker will turn the charger back on.
There are a lot of moving parts in this method but it is pretty reliable, although it can be hard to troubleshoot. I can’t swear that the short on/off charging cycles are better than charging to 100% then letting the phone switch to trickle, but I bet it is. (Any experts want to weigh in on this?) Short charging cycles won’t heat the battery as much. For the really geeky, you can take IFTTT out of the process by getting a Sonoff wifi switch and putting Tasmota onto it so that Tasker can talk directly to the switch. I don’t think there is a Tasker equivalent for iPhones. It should be possible to do something similar with a laptop by using a PowerShell script to check the battery level, but I haven’t tried it. I just got a new phone this month, so ask me in a year or two if this worked.
-- Peter R --
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jd45123
AskWoody PlusApril 12, 2021 at 9:00 pm #2357200 -
PeterR
AskWoody PlusApril 20, 2021 at 8:21 pm #2359305This is my fourth attempt at posting a reply. I think that Woody’s over-caffeinated security software keeps blocking me. If this doesn’t work, I give up.
Tasker is not easy to learn. There is not a lot of official documentation, but a fair number of YouTube videos and forums. The basic concept is that there are “Profiles” and “Tasks” A profile is a condition, such as a battery level, receiving a phone call, an app starting, or a GPS location. Profiles invoke a task. A task can be to play music, take a picture, send an HTTP request, or pop up a screen to enter data.
In the pictures, you can see that there is a profile called “Charge Reached” for when the battery reached (or exceeds) 85%. There is another one called Charge Restart for when the battery gets to 80% or below. The Charge Reached profile runs the task called ChargeStop as shown.
The ChargeStop task, as shown, sends an HTTP request, flashes a message on my screen, then after 3 seconds, sends the HTTP request again. It is sent twice since occasionally something “misfires” along the way.
There is a picture that shows the details of the ChargeStop’s step for HTTP Request. The important part of that step is the URL that comes from IFTTT (which is a separate discussion). I just send that URL and I don’t look at what I get back.
When IFTTT receives that URL, it runs a “webhook” that sends a command to my wifi smart plug.
It sounds complicated, but it works pretty well. It was tough to set up, but now that it is working, it seems simple.
-- Peter R --
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anonymous
GuestApril 12, 2021 at 10:10 am #2356990What does a phone’s user manual say? I’d think by now charging algorithms and protection circuits would prevent anything resembling overcharging or over discharge. Phone batteries don’t have the memory effect NiCAD’s or NiMH batteries do. Charging is a regime of high and slightly lower voltages combined with low and higher current levels controlled by circuitry in the battery pack, not just a blast of constant voltage with whatever current results.
Why 80%? Why not 90% or 60%? If 80% is optimal, the battery could very easily be designed to stop there, then display 100%. No one would know the difference.
How do you charge to 80%? Watch the percentometer and quickly yank the power cord at exactly 80%? Sarcasm, yes, but apps that can do that have to know what the battery’s capacity really is, something that has to determined by the first few full charge/discharge cycles. There are as many forum topics on true battery capacity as there are on true 80% charge.
Heat during charging, discharging and use is something that reduces battery life. We love to prop our phones up while driving, often on a hot dash or play videos until they get toasty. There’s plenty of good data that shows exposure to 60C (140F) for periods of time reduces battery life; starts below that temp. If a phone is hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold, that’s likely a problem.
IMHO, the 80% meme, which has appeared since LiIon batteries became popular, is similar to the stuff about SSD’s being unreliable or having lower life than HDD’s; true long ago but not now.
If anyone can find current controlled experimental data supporting 80% (or 82% or 73% or 64.53%…), let’s see it.
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Alex5723
AskWoody PlusApril 12, 2021 at 11:50 am #2357048What does it mean? I have no clue.
It means that if you wake up everyday at 7AM and leave the iPhone to charge at night, the iPhone will be charged to 80% and remain so for hours and just before your wakeup it will charge up to 100% so you’ll have a fully charged battery for the day.
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doriel
AskWoody LoungerApril 13, 2021 at 12:18 am #2357227Oh my.. Now its so obvious to me. How could I have missed that? Now I understand and it seems like good function to have. Thanks for clarifying this.
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Alex5723
AskWoody PlusApril 12, 2021 at 12:32 pm #2357062It applies to any device with a battery, such as laptops, your Tesla..
“Thou shalt not charge your Tesla to 100%, unless you absolutely must. Electric car batteries should not, generally, be charged to 100%. Long-term, this reduces the battery’s longevity, and Tesla cars actually charge up to 90% by default…’
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Ascaris
AskWoody MVPApril 15, 2021 at 10:54 pm #2358035Why create a rechargeable product that will die if you charge it to capacity?
It will die if you charge it only to 80% too… it will just take longer. Batteries are consumable items, like brake pads on a car. They will need replacement sooner if you do a lot of hard braking than if you treat them gently.
If you’re asking why manufacturers rate their batteries to what they now call 100% rather than limit it to 80% of that and call it 100% (and set the onboard electronics to stop charging at that point, so that does in fact become the new 100%) so it will last longer… well, they could do that, but they would be at a competitive disadvantage when alternative products last longer on a single charge despite having the same physically-sized battery, and with the same nominal materials cost. If a cell phone maker reported a battery capacity that was ~20% lower than that of their closest competitor, resulting in 20% shorter run time on a charge, but they advertised that their batteries lasted (just picking numbers out of the air) 3 years instead of 2, most people would just see the bit about the lower battery capacity and not think about the durability of the battery until it was time to replace it. It seems
On top of that, manufacturers of batteries or the devices that contain them are not necessarily upset if their product wears out and people need to go buy another one. Many people just go buy a new phone when the old one begins to have excessively short run times on a charge, and some manufacturers go out of their way to promote that kind of thinking by making repairs on older models prohibitively expensive, or simply refusing to do those repairs at all (to allow the person in the store to upsell to a new phone) and by doing their best to keep parts out of the aftermarket.
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Save_Us_from_MS
AskWoody LoungerApril 12, 2021 at 3:22 pm #2357133If you want to get serious about it, and you have an Android which has nothing built in, get a Bluetooth dongle (chargie.org).
It works great. I have my phone charging 50 – 55% 24/7 and scheduled to top off to 65%. Even 80% is not necessary everyday for me.
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TechTango
AskWoody PlusApril 12, 2021 at 3:33 pm #2357140A lot of useful nuggets in this thread!
What about “fast” VS “slow” charging?
Obviously, allowing “Fast” charging while the phone is on heats it up significantly more than using a normal slow charging speed.
My take is that the cool slow charge is much more battery friendly than a hot fast charge.
I primarily use a slow charge unless I’m short of time.
Comments?
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doriel
AskWoody LoungerApril 13, 2021 at 5:39 am #2357270The statement about slow charge being more battery friendly sonds reasonable. But phones support fast charge as well, thus it should not be such issue. But I agree, even if its only my assumption.
If Im in a hurry, I plug the phone into charger from electricity, I can gain 30 % very quickli then, in 10 or 15 minutes. Otherwise I prefer to charge my phone prom USB on the computer.But still its a device that should serve me. Not eating my time thinking, whats the best way how to charge it.
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AlexEiffel
AskWoody_MVPApril 20, 2021 at 12:31 pm #2359223Interersting point.
I would be very curious to see an experiment where a phone is charged only on fast charge from 30-80% vs the optimized charge overnight with a slow charger from 30 to 100%. I would bet on the latter as lasting longer.
I love the fast charge during the day as it doesn’t take much to bring the phone close to 80 very fast. But the phone gets hot.
I wonder though if Apple always charged the last 20% slower even on a fast charger (I am not talking about the optimized setting that waits until the end of the night to start charging the last 20%, but the fact that charging slows down significantly after 80%). That could make a big difference vs the early phones if they didn’t slow down. I wonder what happened back then when you plugged a big charger from an Ipad in a phone that didn’t officially support it. Maybe it just charged as slow as a slow charger across the board. I don’t remember.
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AskWoody LoungerApril 13, 2021 at 5:04 am #2357266I use Dell Power Manger’s custom battery settings. but I think it must be supported in hardware for it to work.
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Ascaris
AskWoody MVPApril 13, 2021 at 7:00 am #2357278Is it a recent Dell?
Two of my Dell laptops (G3 [2018] and XPS 13 [2021]) have the ability to set a scheme like that in the UEFI settings, either by selecting a predefined profile or creating a custom one. My Inspiron 11 (a super cheap model) has a much more basic UEFI and (as far as I can recall) doesn’t have that kind of granularity.
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lmacri
AskWoody PlusApril 14, 2021 at 10:52 am #2357594Hi jd45123:
I have an Inspiron 15 5584. You might want to read RamAgent007’s 27-Jan-2021 thread Dell Power Manager – What Happens When the Battery Reaches the Desired “Stop Charging” Level? in the Dell Inspiron forum about creating a Custom battery charging plan with Dell Power Manager. Even though my post in that thread was marked as the solution I’m not entirely sure I understand what the “Start Charging” setting in a Custom power plan does when your laptop is plugged in versus when it’s running on battery power.
My Dell Power Manager v3.7.0 was pre-installed at the factory (it’s listed at Control Panel | Programs | Programs and Features) but I haven’t created a Custom battery plan yet to test how it works. After reading Brian Livingston’s excellent article in the AskWoody newsletter about charging of Li-ion batteries I might give it another go.
If you can’t find the Dell Power Manager app on your Inspiron laptop let us know your exact model.
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jd45123
AskWoody PlusApril 14, 2021 at 7:32 pm #2357738Thanks, I did not have the Power Manager installed, so I found it on Dell’s site, and installed it. I have set it at 80/60. I wonder what the ideal numbers are. I usually have my laptop plugged in. So, it was charging to 100% and staying there, now it should drain to 80% and mostly stay there, Thanks
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lmacri
AskWoody PlusApril 14, 2021 at 10:16 pm #2357757Hi jd45123:
Did you check the product support page for your specific Inspiron model number to ensure that you’ve installed the correct version of the Dell Power Manager? For example, the Drivers and Downloads tab on the product support page <here> for my Inspiron 15 5584 currently recommends the Dell Power Manager v3.7.0 (rel. 28-Sep-2020) when I enter my Service Tag (unique computer ID), but I don’t know if the same version is recommended for every Inspiron model.
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James Bond 007
AskWoody LoungerApril 12, 2021 at 9:57 pm #2357212I have only used iPhones myself.
I always charge my iPhones up to 100% (My iPhones allow charging to 100% and not only 80% with that Optimized Battery Charging feature on, at least that is what they show on screen.) after the charge falls below 20%. But since I only charge my iPhones once every 7-8 days (I am only a light user.) I believe my phones still have pretty good battery life left.
Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.
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AskWoody MVPApril 12, 2021 at 11:28 pm #2357222Yes… I’ve seen 5% cited a bunch of times as a minimum. I have my laptops to hibernate at 5% charge. It may be another thing where more would be better, but 5% has been the one I’ve seen.
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anonymous
GuestApril 14, 2021 at 7:39 pm #2357737Batteries are made out of (a battery of) cells, hence it’s name.
The electro-chemistry behind the Lithium batteries is that when a cell is fully discharged it degrades seriously with the probability of death – meaning it just won’t accept (and therefore supply) any charge. I practical terms you’ll have a battery that both charges and recharges strangely very quickly (because there’s one less cell to recharge) and that battery won’t handle power peaks, with the phone suddenly dying on you (not shutting down properly, just snap dying) suddenly even if reporting a lot of charge on it.
With time cells naturally start degrading on an individual level, and each one has it’s own danger zone that no one can guess. The battery charge indicator is “an average” of all cell charge (as Lithium batteries can linearly and accurately translate voltage to percentage). You can have 5% charge on the battery but with one or more of the cells can be in the danger zone but all the other ones OK.
So hence a safe zone for charging – the greater the safer – and that’s why phones alarm you when about 15%, just to (try to) make sure no individual cell falls under the danger zone.
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Ascaris
AskWoody MVPApril 14, 2021 at 8:15 pm #2357746In multicell battery packs, if one cell reaches zero charge before the others, the electrons flowing from the other cells through the dead cell can begin to charge it, but with the polarity reversed. It’s called cell reversal, and it can permanently damage a battery pack once it is put back on the charger and used.
If it was an AA cell, it would be possible to fully discharge it (by itself) and then charge it back up with the correct polarity (by itself again), but you can’t easily or reasonably do that with a multicell pack, so in that case, I am not sure if that battery can be restored. If it is kept in regular use (attempting to charge and discharge it as normal), it will be damaged very quickly, and this will quite possibly happen before you know anything has gone wrong, so even if the cell reversal could be undone, it would probably be too late by the time it showed any symptoms of malfunctioning.
I am not sure if the electronics built into modern battery packs can detect incipient cell reversal and cut off the current flow to protect itself or not.
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Alex5723
AskWoody PlusApril 13, 2021 at 3:20 am #2357257I believe my phones still have pretty good battery life left.
You can check your battery health.
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John782
AskWoody LoungerApril 13, 2021 at 10:50 am #2357326I have used the AccuBattery app for about a year or so. It works well for me. I charge my Galaxy S-10 phone to 80% with one exception. If we have severe weather potential and a good possibility of power outages then I will over ride the 80% and charge to 100%. When you get the 80% notification, it will charge past that up to the 100% charge unless you unplug the charger.
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Will Fastie
Newsletter EditorApril 14, 2021 at 1:16 pm #2357642Every cell phone I’ve ever owned has been plugged into a charger overnight and charged to 100%.
That’s what I’ve done historically, too. My Lumia 920 lasted two years, another 18 months after battery replacement (that was tought). My Lumia 950 lasted two years but only one year more with a replacement battery, probably because the replacement was manufactured the same year as the phone.
My experience with the same phone charged in the same way was entirely different.
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anonymous
GuestApril 14, 2021 at 7:22 pm #2357732Concerning Lenovo Vantage app, will this work on other laptops? If not, is there a Dell equivalent to this Lenovo Vantage app?
Thanks
I don’t know about the software, but first your hardware needs to support charging limit of its battery and not all computers do, even the new ones.
KDE does support this function by software, but unfortunately my hardware doesn’t. I wish you luck!
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Bill C.
AskWoody PlusApril 14, 2021 at 9:34 pm #2357755I have a Gen 1 iPhone SE. After 4 years and 7 months, the battery is still at 97% capacity. I have used the “Optimized Battery Charging” and have never let it get below 46% before recharging.
I charge it before bed and turn off the WiFi so it does not keep seeking a signal and it is at 99-100% in the morning.
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Mele20
AskWoody LoungerApril 15, 2021 at 8:55 am #2357869our iPhone uses on-device machine learning to learn your daily charging routine so that Optimized Battery Charging activates only when your iPhone predicts it will be connected to a charger for an extended period of time
That is so absurd. I am NOT a robot. I charge my iPhone 10 XR when it needs charging and I don’t get up at the same time every day or use my phone the same way every day. There is NO daily “routine” for it to learn! It’s 2 years and 4 months old now and the battery is at 94% which I guess is pretty good.
Actually, battery health is more important in the iWatch series 5 I have and I LOVE my iWatch (only “like” my iPhone) and wish it had longer battery life. With the iWatch you can’t optimize the charge and it is a much more used and useful item than the iPhone (I wish Apple would let us separate them).
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AlexEiffel
AskWoody_MVPApril 15, 2021 at 5:46 pm #2358008That is interesting but it leaves me with many questions.
From my personal anecdotal experience, Iphones that have seriously degraded batteries after two years are those that has been used a lot by our salesmen. They wait anxiously the end of our 3 years period. The other phones are usually fine despite people charging them overnight even before the new optimized battery setting. My guess is the usage you do with your phone is the most important factor in all this. The more you use it (the more full cycles you end up doing however you do them in multiple sessions or one session), the more you damage your battery, by far, unless maybe if you are the type that leaves it get extremely low and charge it on a fast charger to a 100% and then leave it plugged.
I am not sure that the 100% displayed by Apple is really 100% or if it is not an 80% or 90% displayed as a 100%. That would make a difference.
I bet Apple know at least a bit what they are doing when they made the optimized battery setting, trickle charging close to 100% for many hours probably being not great. Slowing down the charging above 80% at all times and also waiting the end of the night to charge above 80% with the optimized setting might have a good impact, although not optimal. Yes they want to sell more phones, but usually, especially lately, they seem to have gained more love by acting in the interest of their customers, extending support and performance of older models by tuning their newer IOS better to handle older models. They probably gain more by having a quality product with people that wants to change because of the new things they bring rather than because their phones die too fast. They know battery is one the most annoying thing to people about phones. Apple don’t gain if they are perceived as selling a clearly inferior product that dies too fast.
However, I must admit that since they revamped the battery tab, it has become completely useless by drowning the user with meaningless information vs the previous way of presenting information. I wondered if they purposefully wanted to make it impossible for people to realize they had only 3-4 hours of usage after a full charge. There is no clear way anymore to see why your battery drops and by how much. They present usage per 24 hours, but not since last charge and it is not clear what the percentage shown is about. Often, the battery drops by much more than what is written there, as some hidden process or system is draining the battery. It is not easy to know which apps are draining more power per minute. If the app uses the GPS, is it counted as part of the app draining or the hidden system portion? This could be improved by a lot. And I am someone who turns off every system background process I can, notifications, background apps, etc. That is how I quickly saw when they had battery bugs after some defective releases of IOS, being used to having a very slow steady decline of battery when idle (and yes I know about the re indexing and other household chores of the OS after an update, so I refer to the problem being still there 2 weeks after).
Is there a way on an Iphone without running a battery draining background app to receive a notification from the system when it reaches 80% so you stop charging? I don’t know.
Is it worse to fully charge your phone for a day and have it at 30% and then have to charge it or charge it to 80% and then end up at 10% when you can charge it?
My take on all this and this is what I would say to people from what I understood:
-use slow chargers whenever possible because heat is the enemy or maybe if you need faster charge use the fast charger up to 80% then switch to slow (but the Iphone already seems to slow down charging after 80% so is it really necessary, maybe not, but maybe it is marginally better). I am thinking it would be easy for me to plug it on the slow charger here and there during the day when I work from home.
-avoid getting below 20-25% if possible and charge it a little bit whenever convenient during the day as soon as it drops below 70%, up to about 80%, don’t be afraid to charge it here and there multiple sessions a day like if you get in your car. The myth of the memory effect or the number of charge regardless of the duration of the charge needs to go.
-Try to reasonably not let it charge above about 80% if you will be able to recharge it easily and try hard to not leave it plugged for extended periods of time, especially when charged to 100%.
-Don’t worry too much if you need to charge fully before using it for a day where it won’t be convenient to recharge.
-Use optimized battery setting so if you really need to charge it overnight one night, it will at least save the 80-100% portion for the end of the night.
I would really like to hear Apple on battery management.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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berniec
AskWoody PlusApril 15, 2021 at 6:09 pm #2358012I need some advice on how to handle Accubattery {which is *very* cool app!] for my phone/tablet. Basically it means that I can never leave either device plugged in overnight which leads to a few problems for me: first is juggling my chargning discipline to accommodate “montored” charging and then I power down my devices overnight [so they’re charged for the new day]. I’m kinda doing that but it is a nuisance — how do you folks make it not be a pain to properly charge your battery.
Second: what about backups? I’ve never fully understood how and when backups/syncs work [this with the OneDrive cloud, formerly with the Samsung cloud]. But it certainly won’t do a sync if the devices are powered down. Do I have to add to my daily ritual to manually backup/sync stuff or will the devices be smart enough to get it done anyway?
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Paul T
AskWoody MVPApril 16, 2021 at 2:41 am #2358075I wouldn’t bother using a battery app that requires you to stop charging manually – life’s too short. Charge the phone when required and live with the small loss of capacity.
Never assume your phone is being backed up. Do it yourself manually when you have time, but daily is probably not required as calendar and mail tends to be kept on the server as well as the phone.
cheers, Paul
1 user thanked author for this post.
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Ascaris
AskWoody MVPApril 16, 2021 at 3:32 am #2358083Charge the phone when required and live with the small loss of capacity.
That’s how I see it too. But I would add to that to buy phones (and laptops, and anything else that isn’t disposable-cheap) that facilitate battery replacement. It’s a little more research to do before you buy, but when it is time to replace the battery and you are able to do it in a few minutes with a single phillips screwdriver* (as with my Acer Swift and any of my three Dell laptops… all my other laptops are old and have externally removable batteries), you’ll be glad you did.
Smartphones are not as easy to open up as laptops usually are, but there are easier ones and harder ones to service within that framework. I saw the description (with photos) on how to open up my Motorola G7 Play and it was fairly simple. It’s new, so it won’t be for a while that it needs a new battery hopefully, but when the time comes, it should not be that hard.
* Edit: Actually, it takes two screwdrivers on the two aluminum-cased laptops, the XPS and the Swift. Both of them use Torx screws on the outside. At least they’re readily available at the hardware store (standard Torx, not the security type), unlike the pentalobe proprietary screws some fruit laptop manufacturers use to keep their owners out of them!
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)-
This reply was modified 4 years ago by
Ascaris. Reason: Footnote added
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This reply was modified 4 years ago by
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anonymous
GuestApril 16, 2021 at 10:49 am #2358126Sorry for my ignorance but I’m totally stumped by all this info. I have the I Phone SE 2020. I use it very seldomly but do turn it on every day. I have Optimized Battery Charging turned on. I charge the phone once a week when it gets low. I use the white cable that came with the phone plugged into a wall socket. When I charge it is it going to 80% but showing 100%? Or am I supposed to unplug the phone from charging when I see it has reached 80% (assuming I am around to witness this). Thanks for any clarification provided!
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AlexEiffel
AskWoody_MVPApril 17, 2021 at 12:15 am #2358313Well, I don’t think anybody knows if Apple displays 100% but it is something else behind.
Anecdotal evidence I have supporting a good amount of Iphones over many years, I would say, based on this and the article :
-If you only charge the phone once a week when it gets low, try to charge it a bit more often and try to not let it go below 20-25% so as to avoid entering the danger zone to damage battery, especially when the battery gets older if I understood properly.
-When you charge, you can unplug when it reaches 80% shown on the phone in the hope that it will make a difference in the long run on your battery life.
-Avoid charging overnight if possible.
So basically, try to maintain its charge in the 30% or more to 80% zone.
Don’t hesitate to charge it as soon as it drops below 70% if it is a good moment for you, it is even better to not wait until it discharges more. You can plug and unplug your phone as often as you want without any second thought with the small charger of the Iphone when you are in the right zone. It is not as powerful as the bigger ones of the Ipad so it charges more slowly and it is better for the battery.
And as Paul T and Ascaris said, life is too short to stress too much about striving for absolute optimization of the battery life. Unless you are retired with not much money and lots of time and you want to reach the full now 6 years plus of OS support Apple seem to provide, maybe you try to keep those ideas in mind, but don’t worry too much if you don’t always do things properly, at least don’t let your phone discharge too much which seems to be worse than anything else. Oh, and I forgot : keep it away from heat and cold.
I hope this helps you keep it simple. It’s not as bad as the length of this text.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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Paul T
AskWoody MVPApril 17, 2021 at 2:04 am #2358332I have Optimized Battery Charging turned on
Then you have done everything you need to do to have maximum battery life. Relax and enjoy.
cheers, Paul
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Bob Coleman
AskWoody PlusApril 17, 2021 at 1:32 am #2358283(On an Android phone) I’ve been using an app named simply Battery by Vujacic Zoran.
I tried AccuBattery. but, as far as I can tell, it makes one nondescript sound when the set maximum charge is reached. This is easy to perhaps miss. Battery says “Battery fully charged”. If I hear that, it’s pretty clear what it means. Battery appears to have a setting to set how often the warning “Battery fully charged” is repeated, but it doesn’t seem to work. However, the “Battery fully charged” is repeated approximately every 30 seconds. I prefer this to one, non-repeating sound whose meaning may not be clear.
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anonymous
GuestApril 17, 2021 at 10:13 am #2358362Thanks AlexEiffel & Paul T for making the instructions much clearer.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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