One of the first things you consider while buying a new phone is its battery capacity and battery life. While battery life is completely subjective to individual use, one thing is for certain -- If you have owned a smartphone for a while, you would have noticed that your phone's battery life isn't as good as it once used to be.
Phone batteries are supposed to age just like human beings do and their overall performance could be down due to various factors including regular wear and tear. However, it could also be due to your charging habits. More precisely, down to how we charge our most beloved pieces of technology.
According to experts, most of us have been charging our phones and tablets the wrong way - all this time.
An education website called Battery life, run by battery testing components supplier Cadax, suggests that most of us have been charging our phones the wrong way and gives some helpful tips that will help prolong your phone's battery life.
Never charge your phone overnight
Normally, what most people do is plug in their dead phones at the end of the day and charge it overnight, but it turns out that this habit is doing more harm than good, according to a Mirror report.
Some may have heard or read somewhere that charging a phone overnight might run the risk of the phone blowing up and causing injuries to the user while asleep. But that's not exactly the case.
As some of us might know, a vast majority of smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets derive their juice from lithium-ion batteries. These batteries contain an anode, a cathode, and a chemical electrolyte.
When the phone is in use, the charge is pushed from the positive cathode and attracted to the negative anode with the help of the electrolyte, before being distributed to the different components of the phone. While charging the phone, the entire process is reversed.
Charge your phone more often, but for shorter times
According to an educational website called Battery University, the best way to charge your phone is not to charge it fully or overnight, but to charge it frequently but in short bursts. The site claims that doing so will help ensure a good overall battery life.
It doesn't matter whether you charge up to 10 percent or 20. The site says, "partial charges cause no harm."
Don't let the battery drain below 15 percent
And more often than not, we keep hearing that we should fully deplete our batteries before we charge them back again. This again isn't ideal, say the experts on the site run by Cadax, a company that offers devices that test smartphone batteries.
The experts suggest that a "deep-discharge" where the battery is down to zero or a fraction of its power is actually bad for the battery and will decrease the overall battery life-span out more quickly.
So, it's advisable to avoid draining your smartphone to zero or hitting the red on the battery indicator which is 15 percent on most phones.
Keep the battery between 65% to 75%, ideally
According to them, the sweet spot is between 65 percent and 75 percent of your battery's full charge.
The experts also recommend that you should never charge your phone all the way up to 100 percent. It's best to keep it around 90 – 95 percent and you're good to go. That's partly because modern lithium-ion batteries do not require to be fully charged, the company claims.
The website states: "In fact, it is better not to fully charge because a high voltage stresses the battery."
You don't need to remove the charger when it's full
In case you decide to ignore the above suggestion and charge your phone to the full, and beyond, you needn't worry at all. You simply don't need to remove the charger when the phone hits 100 percent charge.
That's also because modern day chargers automatically turn off the charging process once it hits 100 percent. So contrary to what you've been hearing or reading all this while, you're not going to do any damage by leaving the charger connected to your device.
But still, it is recommended that you avoid leaving your phone to charge overnight.
That said, it's advisable to charge your phone lesser and more often and in case you would point out that you are always on the go and do not have a power source at your disposal, try getting a new power bank, they're selling cheap these days.
