Most high-quality LiPo-powered devices already do this at the hardware-level. The 100% level you see on the software is usually 80% actual charge on the battery.
Any way to tell? I just got a monster phone with a 22K mAh battery.
For Android, there are a multitude of apps, such as Wattz that will tell you the actual voltage of the battery. Full may be 4.2V or 4.35V depending on the chemistry used. ACCA (root required) will let you limit charge rates and stop charging at a certain percentage.
Staying under 4 volts (around 60% for most phone batteries) will vastly extend battery service life. 80% is a bit less extension, but still far better than charging to 100%.
i was looking for something like acca since forever
foss discoverability needs some mad work
I just use Home Assistant + smart switch
how do you do it?
Just set up an automatic to turn the switch off when the battery reaches 80%. Then back on when <75%.
that doesn’t answer the question of whether there’s a way to tell that their battery is limited to 80% on hardware level, though.
That’s one hell of a battery
What phone is that‽
I don’t know, it says “Heavy duty” on the side.
Apparently the name is Doogee V Max EDIT: or Unihertz Tank
Curious too
Thanks!
Late reply:
https://oukitel.com/pages/oukitel-wp33-pro
This replaces my old phone, Bluetooth speakers, battery banks, all that. Hella heavy, but so is all that other crap. I can drop it 5’ deep in the swamp, go down and get it. Still testing!
Jesus Christ that’s a car battery
omg kilo milliampere
k = 10^3 and m = 10^-3 so they will cancel out. It’s just Ah without any prefixes at that point.
Charge it from a smart power supply from battery at 1 to 100% then it can show you the number of mah/h it took to charge it.
I have this power supply which also has USB-C https://a.aliexpress.com/_mrChiQ6
Not sure how accurate this would be as charging is not 100% efficient. Also the amount of power the phone uses while charging would have to be taken into account as well.
My phone has a 10.8Ah battery and it’s huge, no idea how big that must be.
mAh are a terrible way to measure capacity, look for watt-hours instead. You need to know the voltage for it to be a relevant measurement
22Ah at 4.35V would be 96Wh, which iirc is just under the limit of 100Wh you can take on flights in the us, and thus the limit for basically all laptops.
It’s a pity they don’t offer the option to ‘supercharge’ to 100, so you get extended battery life when desired, when you know you will need it. Say, going camping, or plan to use the phone a lot for whatever reason.
Turn it up to 11!
Yes, they could call it spinal batt.
So can I charge my phone to 11?
It’s one more than ten, so yeah, it’s better.
Yea that’s what I’ve heard, and I personally keep stuff plugged in
It was a recent article by iFixit, so I thought I’d share it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
80% “software” should keep the battery even healthier…
Isn’t the charge limit of the battery arbitrary? The manufacturer can set whatever target voltage they want , so it’s meaningless to say they limit the battery to 80% when they decide what 100% is.
Yes
Do you have sources?
Just build phones with the understanding that batteries are consumables and make them easy to replace and standardized. Then swap in a new $5 battery when you need to so. Make the raw materials reclaimable too of course.
But then you aren’t forced to buy a new phone every few years?
The money is in the software services nowadays anyway. Subscription AI bullshit, cloud n stuff.
What? No just a new battery. That’s the point.
That’s the point of what this guy is saying.
But the point of making batteries not easily removable (besides the waterproofing factor) is that when a repair shop charges them $150 to do it, lots of people will justify putting that money towards a new phone instead.
As someone who works on phones as a hobby, I’ve seen that the percentage of people who will either hire someone to do it or buy a different phone is near 100. It’s absolutely an intentional planned obsolescence.
Waterproofing is a lame excuse that I won’t accept from these manufacturers. It may be not as easy as just permanently gluing the thing together, but it’s definitely possible to have a sealed battery compartment.
For example cameras have been weatherproof for decades now. And you can both change the batteries and plug a bunch of stuff in them no problem.
They were being sarcastic and quoting something a phone manufacturer would say.
No one is forced. Especially with fast charging.
Sure, if my battery lasts literally 30min, I’m totally not forced to buy a new phone. I’ll just fast charge my way through the world.
30 min? LMAO.
I literally know someone with this type of issue. Battery goes from like 70 to 20 in maybe 20 minutes
Their phone isn’t even that old
I know lemmy hates Apple but HOW?!
My five year old iPhone lasts all day, and is as fast as what I bought it?!
That battery has to be bad. I loved the shit out of my HTC Dream but that only went from 30% to 0 when the battery was BUSTIN
It was probably abused. I’ve never had a phone get that bad and I really do not think that is some widespread thing. Otherwise you’d see a lot of three year old EVs with a 20 mile range.
not entirely sure tbh Just know their battery is shit at this point
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Toward the end of my pixel 5’s life, the battery in it lasted about 10 minutes. The phone itself was 3 years old. It happens.
How?! I’m currently on a five year old phone that lasts all day with its original battery?!
I get the feeling it has to do with how wireless charging works. On a wire, a phone can regulate how quickly it takes charge or whether it does at all. I don’t think phones are capable of that with wireless charging, which is exclusively how I charged my pixel 5 at night.
So it would get to 100% and stay there for several hours every single night. I didn’t realize it was bad at the time.
It could always just be that I was unlucky and got a defective battery to begin with. No way to know for sure.
Abuse or defects or environment. I’ve, for example, seen one phone which was constantly woken up (technical term in case it sounds odd) because of some event in the wireless signal and that made it use up the battery in a ridiculously short time. It was a combination of the way a network was set up, bad signal quality, and a firmware quirk. Clearly a defect, but hard to say whose. Forcing it to use some mode in the radio via settings circumvented that.
This is what the new European bill is forcing manufacturers to do.
Batteries of handheld electronics have to be easily replaceable.
No. People online have really misrepresented that bill.
All it says is that it should be easily replaceable by someone of moderate skill. I.e. still having to pry open your phone carefully, but now without using strong adhesive.
It also doesn’t apply for phone batteries over a certain size, or batteries that will still retain a set amount of capacity after a few years (I think 73%).
People are heavily, heavily mistaken if they think it’ll be a return to the days of trivially removable batteries.
The biggest barrier for “most people with moderate skill” is having to acquire equipment to replace the battery. Once it becomes too much effort and cost it’s better for most consumers to take it to the manufacturer or 3rd party service for replacement.
I stopped replacing batteries once I needed to heat the adhesive to remove the back and screen as I don’t have that equipment to hand, and initial attempts caused damage to the screen and back cover.
It’s a start but pretty weak.
Weak in which sense ?
Looking forward to the first lawsuit about this.
Do most people not have the option to protect their battery already?
I think that’s a Samsung feature
It’s built into my pixel as well. Shrug
You have an older Pixel or just rooted, maybe? My 7 on the latest vanilla Android doesn’t seem to have it, and this thread seems to say it’s not available in the stock os.
Is called adaptive charging
It’s on my pixel 7 pro at least
Ah, I see. I was focused on the 80% limiter for that “Maximum” setting, which I think is not an option on Pixel. But I see now that “Adaptive Charging” sounds like it does what that middle setting “Adaptive” does.
“Sleep time is estimated based on your usage patterns”
These systems exist on pretty much all modern phones, but they all work the same (shitty) way, by assuming your schedule is exactly the same every day and giving you zero programmable control.
And on iPhone the system expects you want your battery to charge over 80% on a daily basis. On a Samsung phone the system knows you don’t want to go past 80% at all, so it sets that as the new maximum.
Sure, but let’s also preserve current batteries as long as possible so we can lower our carbon foot print. We need to do both.
To be clear, you are still taking about rechargeable batteries right? I agree those should be replaceable. I sure as hell don’t think phone should use single use batteries!
Yes, 18650 or a standardized rectangular equivalent.
A standard would be nice… I mean all phones are basically the same size and shape.
If it shouldn’t be charged above 80%, then make 80% the new 100%. “But this one goes to 11”
They already did. The percentage range on your phone’s battery display is basically a usable range rather than an absolute range. The article talks about phone manufacturers making changes to their charging systems to optimize battery function, but the headline bit about not charging past a certain point has been taken into account by Android and iOS for ages.
Very few android phones actually have this feature, most manufacturers strip it
A lot of charging circuits and battery designs already do this transparently.
Yes. Batteries are bags of chemicals. They don’t really have percentages. Where you decide 100% is is somewhat arbitrary and up to the battery management.
What the system shows the user may be even a completely different number and there may be software adjustable values.
It’s inherently a made up number and a manufacturer can decide to be more brutal or more sparing in how they treat the chemicals.
This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.
All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.
Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.
Your device manufacturer has designed it to break in as many ways as possible so you have to buy a new one.
Why do you think everyone switched to non-removable batteries?
If you don’t take responsibility for your device, you are just like the people that think not owning your own hardware is fine.
Why do you think everyone switched to non-removable batteries?
Well the purported reasoning is that less shielding is required. Seems plausible but IDK how true. I assume it’s partly true.
Some day you will learn that nearly every justification made by corporations like this is bullshit.
But I bet they’re glad you continue to spread it so loyally.
you continue to spread it so loyally
Whatever mate.
My comment acknowledges that it’s a dubious claim. I’d hardly call that spreading nonsense loyally.
Let the corps fuck you for a few more decades and you’ll be jaded like me.
More probably because the fucking bloodsuckers are getting better at it.
Jaded?
No, I think you’re just another snarky Lemmy commenter that doesn’t bother actually readying and understanding anything but trots out the same tired positions in thread after thread.
You really don’t have to be like this. You choose to be this way.
100% agree. Mate, there’s an another ongoing post on lemmy about autosaving documents, and how everyone seems to think that saving files with their fingers pressing keys on a keyboard is the best approach possible in 2024 because software just can’t do this reliably.
Of course everyone also knows better than their charger, battery and device.
Yup. If it’s such a huge issue, phones should only charge to 80% and report that to the user as 100%. But phone manufacturers won’t do that, because users want to be able to report the longest battery life possible when selling new phones. They don’t care that the charging habits are bad for battery longevity, because the user has already purchased the phone.
And they will purchase their next phone sooner if the battery on their old phones die early.
Samsung phones have the capability to do this. There’s a setting you can set to only charge to 80%. It looks like they mention that in the article.
Android phones in general have something called Adaptive Charging that attunes to when you normally need a full charge. For instance if you are charging at night while you’re sleeping it will charge slower than it would during the day to improve battery health.
Mine automatically charges to 80% if you have an alarm set, then it charges the rest in the last minutes.
No, it’s your problem.
The manufacturers correctly surmise that most people prefer a battery that holds it’s charge longer over the first year or so, rather than a battery that will last more years.
If your preferences differ from that of most people, then you need to exercise your preferences.
When you say “make it do x and y” who should be the person that does it? Without raising enough awareness of the problem, change will not happen. The only way for it to happen is that enough people is pissed off and changes brands.
You sound quite irritated. iFixit doesn’t even make phones. Direct it elsewhere.
He’s directing it to a forum of people under a topic regarding phones not being optimized to charge past 80%. Quite a fair frustration I’d say, since most people charge their phones while sleeping. The technology should stop charging automatically
Most Android phones do, hell even the experimental phones like PinePhone do. You just have to flip a toggle.
Except many like mine don’t have that option. The best they have is “optimized” charging that tries to only hit full when you go to unplug it.
I charge mine at night with an alarm on it for getting up in the morning, my dad however charges his multiple times a day as he puts it on when it only drops down to 95-80%.
Sir, this is a lemmy. It’s all about figuring out how to be the most outraged rather than the most rational.
Let’s not bring that energy. Let’s try to be better.
Just kidding! Or am I?
Nah, that’s Reddit.
It’s funny how people think that the users here are substantially different than reddit users. It’s the same shit, just fewer of us and the political alignment is further left.
If you don’t ever charge it to over 80% then it’s effectively already degraded 20% since the day you got it. I’ll rather just use it as intented and then replace the battery when it no longer holds charge. That’s just one of the reasons I didn’t buy one with built in battery.
But you can still choose to charge it to 100% when you anticipate you need that extra 20%. So it’s not really “already degraded” it’s just “on demand”.
Which has consequences. Spontaneously staying out if you didn’t decide to charge to 100% the night before and running out of battery.
It’s not “on demand” it’s “in stock ready for dispatch.”
I don’t want to have to order a day ahead to get a non-degraded battery.
If you keep it at 80% it doesn’t take a day to charge to full. As long as you know 1 or 2 hours in advance, it’ll be full.
But yeah, if your use-case is that you spontaneously need to leave your charger and require your full battery capacity, you should keep charging it to full. Maybe even get a powerbank as well.
If anyone is living a life where they might not spontaneously “leave their charger” they’ve given up or have young children they have to be responsible for.
On weekdays I know what I’m doing from when I leave my house until work ends. I might have plans after that, I might not. But I’m not going to short charge my phone because I usually go home after work in case I don’t.
A phone battery should last as long as I might stay awake, that way I don’t have to think about it.
People generally underestimate the mental effort of tiny decisions and micromanaging things.
In general the most freeing thing someone can do to is ensure their future self doesn’t have to think about something.
Anyone micromanaging their phone battery is micro-damaging their mental health.
It’s the same problem with our new disposable bag ban in Denver.
Now, if I want to grocery shop, I need to take re-usable bags with me all day: on the bus, at work, etc, if there’s any possibility of grocery shopping on the way home.
Gone are the days of deciding to grocery shop on a whim.
Of course, this law was passed by people who all have cars. For them, grocery bags are something you can keep in your car, and then the furthest you have to carry them is from your garage into your kitchen.
Oh, and the bag ban isn’t all stores. It’s just the big evil stores that aren’t allowed to use disposable shopping bags. The rule, specifically, is any store with more than three locations is banned from offering disposable bags. Small, local places are still allowed to have disposable bags.
Well guess what. You know who shops for groceries at small local places? Rich people. You know who shops for groceries at massive chains? Poor people.
By targeting “the big evil corps” they also conveniently targeted the “corps with enough volume to get prices down to serve poor people”.
Now, I don’t think it’s a deliberate attempt to fuck with poor people. I think these legislators are trying to help. It’s just that none of them has any conception of what the life of most of their constituents is like. They’ve been upper middle class for so long, they just don’t know how people live. How much of an utter pain in the ass it is to not be able to have disposable bags.
And the cherry on top is that I bought a little trash can for my bathroom with a soft close lid that’s designed to take shopping bags as its trash bags.
I won’t run out for a while, but eventually I’m gonna run out of shopping bags and have to start buying little trash bags for that bin.
Now you’re spending limited cognitive resources to try and anticipate phone battery usage.
While true, I consider it a reasonable trade. I so rarely need the 100% charge.
But increasingly the batteries are glued in.
Thanks to EU this will be changing in the near future. Personally I’m one of the stubborn ones who refused to buy devices with non-removable batteries and by the looks of it I will never have to either. Hopefully this applies to the headphone jack aswell.
The USB C to audio jack is ok. I’d like to have replaceable batteries, but my last few phones there wasn’t one that had that and what else I wanted. I had to compromise. Glad the EU is forcing things to improve.
I strongly disagree.
I have yet to buy a phone without a headphone jack.
I’ve got earphones that are 17 years old and sound great. An audio jack in the car that connects way faster than Bluetooth. A hifi older than me.
The amount of electrical waste and incompatibilities caused by ditching a universal standard is not small.
The standard still usable, you just need an adaptor. I don’t because Android Auto is my car navigation anyway, so it might as well do audio for podcasts. If I’m out and about, or doing house stuff, my bluetooth ear piece means I can listen to podcasts without wires in the way. At work, I’ve not used wired headphones since forever. I subconsciously chewed the cable and kept pushing out my chair to roll over somewhere forgetting the wire.
Adapters are more electric thrash.
Not really, as it’s a standard you could keep the adaptor longer than the phone. Adaptors keep legacy stuff in use, extending their lives.
So how do you charge your phone while listening to music? Plug a splitter dongle into your headphone dongle? When this could be built into your phone? Yes a compromise.
Yer a cable that has both a male USBC and a female USB C and audio Jack. Easy. It’s not worth limiting phone options for. Plus mainly I use bluetooth anyway.
Increasingly I buy fairphones
I nearly did, but I wanted to try GrapheneOS. Until now I’ve been LinageOS without Google (over a decade), but I’ve had to compromise and wanted to reduce how much that compromised me.
I know sooner or later I’ll have to degoogle. Maybe once I know the first thing about how to run my home server I’ll get to it.
Nextcloud fills a lot of the hole. I still use Google as little as I can, but I was bumping into apps that were are hard requirement to do things. Banking apps (no seperate security device anymore), EV charger apps (old chargers don’t all have simple card payment) is just two classes.
We have a real issue here. The duopoly of Google and Apple is being reenforced by infrastructure requiring apps. Regulators need to wake up.
It’s a whole system of bad incentives, yeah. I’ll make a note to look into nextcloud, thanks!
I use Nextcloud for my auto-photo uploads, calendars, contacts, notes and passwords. I’ve been using it at least 8 years. It’s great. 😃
I’ve never seen an unreplaceable battery. Most phones use a glue that is easily removed with pull-tabs.
That being said it’s still a far cry from the devices of yore where you just popped off the back cover and slapped a new one in.
I watched videos on it for my previous phone. You had to use a heat gun to warm the glue but not heat it too much or you damage the screen. It was a bit of a knife edge temperature wise. Plus you then had to take most of the phone apart to get at the battery. It just wasn’t practical. Replacing the screen looked better, but was as easy as it was on an old phone I did. This stuff just isn’t designed with repair in mind.
I replaced the battery in a 2016 iPhone SE and it was hell. Microsurgery to get the phone apart, multiple attempts at undoing the glue, and at the end the home key didn’t work. Result: upgraded phone.
I miss the form factor off my HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 for Americans). It had a neat, flip-out keyboard, swappable batteries, and a compact, 3.7 inch display.
If you don’t ever charge it to over 80% then it’s effectively already degraded 20%
I wouldn’t agree. I’m doing that with my car, e.g., or with my notebook. 80% on both never sees the end of a normal day around here, but if I know a day is going to be long, e.g. going to a conference or something like that, I remove the limit before and have 20% more range on the first leg of the trip or know safely that I won’t have to hunt for a plug in the hallway at a party in the evening. If I were to degrade the battery immediately I wouldn’t have that option.
but that’s an incommensurable, fallacious comparison. What the article talks about is battery life, not single charge duration
.
Here’s my headline: Why obsessing over battery degradation is unhealthy and you should just do whatever is easiest for you
“hey here is a way to increase the life of your battery by possibly 400%.”
“OMG! Why are you obsessing over this!”
Seriously how dare they try to help us and educate us!
the 400% figure is extremely misleading and based on old assumptions and old battery tech.
Also it you’re not keeping the phone for 20 years then it doesn’t make sense to calculate “total electrons” over the absolute entirety of the battery “life”.
Agreed. If you’re a device maker and you haven’t considered the possibility of your users plugging in their devices for long periods of time in your design, then i feel that’s on you to improve your product.
I don’t like this article because it misses some of the more important details around how to lengthen your device’s life and why you may or may not want to keep your battery at a specific state of charge.
- State of charge is pretty arbitrary, your charging circuit could charge between 3.0V and 4.2V (pretty typical), or it could charge between 3.2V and 4.0V and still show 4.0V as being 100% charge. Different chemistries can have slightly (or significant in the case of LFP) different voltages. The cynic in me wouldn’t be surprised if eventually 100% becomes ~4.35V because it makes their device look better to tech reviewers, but then have it default to only charge to 4.2V because it still gives suitable device life.
- The most important factors in how long your device’s battery will last are temperature and how deeply you discharge the battery. Discharging your phone down until it dies does way more damage than keeping it charged at 100%.
- At some point practicality comes into it, you would get even more total energy out of a cell if you kept it between 40% and 60% all the time, but obviously it isn’t very practical to only use 20% of your phone’s available capacity in day to day use.
- Consider how long you are storing your device. If it is always plugged in or won’t be used for months, then something like 40% to 60% would be a more suitable state of charge to keep your device at if possible. If it sits on your desk and you need to unplug it periodically and know you don’t need the full charge, then sure keep it at 80%.
Personally, I don’t stress about the batteries in my devices at all. I generally keep an eye on the power and plug it in when convenient, but target plugging it in before it gets too far below 50%. I’ve historically had almost zero issues with the batteries in my devices wearing out before I’m ready to replace it for other reasons unless it started out with marginal battery life.
Yep. Battery chemistry is a real pain in the ass. Every few years someone spins a wheel and determines the next big thing that everyone needs to do to prevent batteries from dying early. For a while people were told full cycles were healthy for avoiding cell memory. Now more sporadic cycles are being peddled.
Use the device as you need it. If you complete a full cycle, cool; if not, that’s fine. Just don’t let the damn thing completely die and don’t keep it permanently on charge. Those are the common things most people do on accident that can really screw up a cell.
It isn’t spinning a wheel though, the advice hasn’t changed in decades (I’ve written something like the above comment at least a dozen times on Reddit since 2008 when I worked in the industry). Rather you might be getting it confused with other cell chemistries. Memory is a problem for NiCd cells, which were popular a long time ago, but even once we moved to NiMH for most things and then Li-ion there is no concern about it. Unfortunately there is a ton of incorrect and bad information out there about batteries so it is hard to wade through the crap and find the real information.
https://batteryuniversity.com is the best resource I know for correct information about li-ion cells, since it is written and maintained by a company that designs battery testing equipment.
Part of the problem is the game of telephone drops the cell chemistry related to the method almost immediately leading to general consumers applying it as a blanket rule for all batteries
Interesting source though…
Yeah, that’s been my whole experience surrounding people being upset that batteries aren’t able to be replaced in phones anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a good habit, but I’ve never had a phone long enough for the battery’s life to degrade to the point where that degradation was more than mildy noticeable.
Maybe that says more about your phone consumption than battery life.
I try not to buy a new phone every year and I can tell you, after 3-4 years, the batteries are very noticeably dying. My last two phones (nexus 4, moto z play) both were replaced due to failing batteries, since replacing them is almost impossible (I couldn’t even find replacements that I would call trustworthy).
My usage was not super unusual, and most days I plugged them in over night and that’s it.
It can also depend on the device. I’ve had smaller devices and have had to charge multiple times a day. After getting a bigger phone with a bigger battery. I simply don’t think about it anymore. I imagine my phone dying before the battery does or even if it does, I’ll pay for a replacement if needed. I’d rather not stress in the day to day.
About 4, I’d start long term storage from 80% because self-discharge rate is 30% per year in room temperature, or 15% per year in the fridge, which is the best storage temperature. Also, Battery University said in some article that 65% charge is optimal for storage, which is ~3.95V/cell at rest for most chemistries.
The reason I said 40-60% is because over that entire range both self-discharge and permanent capacity loss happen at their slowest rates because that is the flat range of the voltage curve where the cell is close to its nominal 3.7V voltage. The self-discharge with starting at 80% will maybe buy you an extra couple months before the cell becomes unusable, but you would experience more irreversible capacity loss.
At the risk of sounding like Spinal Tap, why don’t they just make the chargers stop at 80% and have the interface show 100%?
Edit: woops. Appears that’s already a thing.
Sony phones have a setting called Battery Care that lets you choose 80%, 90% or 100% as the max.
I plug all my devices directly into the power line pole outside; everything charges to 75000%
Before spontaneously combusting
I live in earthquake, volcano, and tsunami territory, so I think I’ll keep charging to 100% for now.
When I lived in the US and went through a hurricane, we had no power for almost 2 weeks and that stuck with me.
Long term, keeping your phone at 80% and having battery backups charged is going to be your best bet, assuming having having said battery backups is reasonable for you. It won’t take long for your 100% to suddenly be what 80% was when the phone was new.
If/when a situation happens where you need it, you can charge up to 100% no problem off the backups.
Well this applies to anything with a lipo/ion battery. If you charge your backup battery pack to 100% then store it, it’s very probably you’ll end up having a drained and fully dead battery when you need it.
Wonder if there are any battery packs designed for long term storage. They could hold 100%(4.2v or whatever) but would internally discharge slowly down to 80% then stop. I bet those huge batteries YouTubers use don’t even have that level of BMS. It’s trivial software but planned obsolescence that eco friendly capitalist companies would never do.
Here I am with 5 year old RC 5k cycle lipos that still have at least 80% of their manufacturing capacity.
Obviously that’ll be true with battery packs too. They’re also significantly cheaper, so it’s usually fairly reasonable to have multiple and them being at 50% capacity doesn’t matter nearly as much.
That’s correct, I agree with you.
That requires this knowledge of how batteries work. Saying keep a battery pack and your phone at 100% could leave people in a situation worse than if they just used the battery manager to stop their phone at 85%. 99% of people will plug their battery pack in until it’s full, stash it wherever they decide for emergencies, and will find a dead pack when they need it.
True, but if you live in a place with natural disasters, and local officials recommend keeping a go bag, you should make a habit to check that once a year. Charge the batteries, swap expired food, etc.
Sure, but if you treat your battery poorly you’re actually going to have less uptime in a natural disaster.
Leaving a battery at 100% over a long time wasn’t recommended but I would imagine most devices have BMS settings to deal with this now.
I would imagine most devices have BMS settings to deal with this now.
There’s not much incentive to do that. Battery longevity reduces sales. Keeping the battery at 100% gives better review scores. It’s a lose lose for phone makers to implement that.
All BMSs I’ve come across have this disabled by default sadly, manufacturers seem to target longest device runtime, rather than extended battery longevity
On my FP3 it needs to be enabled in a terminal, while rooted (newer devices have it in the settings).
On my Steam Deck it also needs to be enabled in a terminal, the exact command differs depending on the model of steam deck. An embedded developer or tinkerer will find it very quickly in the kernel sysfs though
Laptop folks reading this - check your bios settings. My recent Dell (and I’m sure other brands are similar) has options for this. It has a “usually plugged in” setting, but I manually chose to limit charging to 80%, which is an option in the same place.
Obv if this is bad for your use case, don’t do it.
My lenovo legion laptop lets me limit charging to 60% for maximum battery longevity
I have a new laptop that was complaining that I’d had it plugged in too long. Apparently there’s a battery management setting that will have it charge to 80% max. I’ve used laptops exclusively for like 15 years and this is the first one to complain about being plugged in constantly.
My (work) Dell laptop charges from the usb-c dock, which it’s always plugged into because so are my monitors and ethernet etc. As a result, it’s always on charge.
The chemistry from holding that last 20% of charge for a while is what causes the degradation. The BMS can tell the system to stop charging before it’s full but it can’t do anything itself to prevent the cell from slowly being degraded by full charging.
This is is a problem that occurs on the order of years and that’s why the EV companies care but phones historically don’t. More easily replaceable batteries is the real solution here, not software stopping you from fully charging.
It is not the “real solution”. Increasing the battery longevity is much more sustainable than regularly replacing the battery, and is therefore the most rational and responsible course of action.
Yes, but to increase longevity energy density goes down substantially. Manufacturers (and many users including myself) would not make this decision for something as weight and size sensitive as a phone. The lithium ion batteries currently used already last for 2 years after all and are relatively small. A single model S battery contains 7104 individual cells for comparison. Further, lithium battery recycling has made substantial progress over the last year and will already need to be done at scale when higher volumes of EV batteries have reached their end of life. The impact of the of life phone batteries even from the entire world will be dwarfed by that of the 26 million EVs already on the roads today with thousands of cells each (or equivalent if using prismatic cells).
Some cars use LiFePO4 batteries for the superior longevity. But the range is reduced to somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 their lithium ion counterparts. The industry is moving away from this trend in recent years in favor of traditional lithium ion with a software limited charge/discharge range.
My Galaxy s22 has an option “battery protection” that limits my battery charging to 85%. Looks like they had a good idea there.
On the S24, it actually changed to 80%. I also turned off fast charging when charging overnight at home.
Yep, no need to fast charge if it has all night
I believe that’s because google added it too and theirs was set to 80%
I didn’t realize I had this option. Thanks so much!
Same here. Battery still feels like new nearly 2 years later, and I use it as a GPS damn near 40 hours a week on top of normal usage. I like to run my phones into the ground these days, and the battery is almost always the first to go. Looks like I’ll be getting at least another 3 or 3 years out of this one.
… Aren’t devices designed to only charge the battery to 90% (and report that as 100%), because actually changing a battery to 100% is pretty harmful for it?
You’re thinking of cars, industry and others that have high value batteries.
Power tools, smartphones etc charge to the maximum 4.2V/cell, sometimes even 4.3V (some chemistries safely allow it) because the average person just wants the maximum runtime and will replace the equipment before the battery degrades significantly.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere too. The reason being overcharging just once basically kills them, so they give it a lot of leeway and say it’s 100% well before that.
They talk about Apple but Sony phones have had this feature for a while. In the settings you can choose whether the phone is always 100% charged, or whether it charges to 80% (or a custom %) or whether you want it full by the time you wake up.
I use the 3rd option. It stops charging when it gets to 90% and I tell it when I’m getting up, and just before it will charge up to 100 %.
Best of both worlds. Only ever having 80% to start is not nice because you get less juice during the day and need to charge by the evening. Plus battery anxiety. I’d rather have a 100% full battery.
Clearly newer, better battery tech is needed. Plus replaceable batteries.
Samsung, too.
I use it because I want my phone to last as long as possible, but the downside is that it won’t last a day so I have to charge in between. Ironic, isn’t it?
Very ironic.
That’s why I just tell it to be full by morning because I purposely bought a phone with a great battery . Why would I want to hamper it by 20%???
Yeah give your phone a 20% battery handicap out of the box because of your battery degredation paranoia. Dumbest shit ever.
I just charge my phone to full when it’s at like 20 and then unplug it when it’s done charging. Have had this phone for like 2 and a half years and I don’t have noticeable degradation, but it’s a flagship samsung phone so I know they typically have pretty good cells in them.
It’s not paranoia, it’s an issue of how Li-ion batteries work.
I hear the same argument about EVs, where many charge to 80%. Sometimes you need that extra juice, and by all means use it. Other times you’re only going to the grocery store, or sitting at your desk all day, and you can stay plugged in and you don’t really need that 20%. It’s no real skin off your nose either way.
Then, years from now when you need as much energy as your battery can give, you haven’t lost it to degradation and you really haven’t lost much along the way.
I very rarely need a full charge when I get a new phone. Battery rarely drops under 50% unless it’s a heavy use day. However, that same phone 3 years later will be causing me issues because the battery doesn’t last through the day.
I would happily trade off 20% max battery in the first few years, to get a healthier battery 4 years down the line.
Why wait 10 years to get a 20% battery degradation when you can have it today!?
