Smartphones are indispensable, but frequent charging degrades battery health, shortening device lifespan. Enter Chargie, a revolutionary tool designed to extend your battery’s life significantly. Unlike standard charging, which prioritizes speed over health, Chargie introduces a smarter approach, focusing on longevity and sustainability.
The Downside of Fast Charging
Fast charging may seem convenient, but it increases heat and stress on the battery, accelerating wear and reducing its lifespan. This trade-off between speed and longevity is a compromise many are unaware they’re making.
Chargie’s Approach: Slow and Steady Wins the Race
Chargie’s technology offers a solution: slow, controlled charging. By managing the charging process to minimize heat generation, Chargie ensures your battery is charged gently, preserving its capacity and extending its lifespan. This method is proven more effective than the aggressive strategies employed by most built-in phone chargers.
Real Results: Extend Your Battery Life
Chargie isn’t just theory. Users report substantial improvements in battery health and longevity. One user shared, “After using Chargie, my phone’s battery health stayed above 90% after two years, a noticeable difference compared to rapid declines from standard charging.”
Why Chargie Stands Out
Compatibility: Works with any USB-powered device, offering versatility beyond smartphones.
Precision: Allows setting specific charging thresholds, adapting to your lifestyle and charging needs.
Sustainability: By doubling the battery’s lifespan, Chargie reduces the need for replacements, contributing to environmental sustainability.
Make the Smart Choice for Your Smartphone
Chargie represents more than just a charging device; it’s a commitment to sustainability, efficiency, and maximizing the potential of your smartphone. By choosing Chargie, you’re not only investing in the longevity of your device but also in a future where technology and sustainability go hand in hand. Equip your phone with Chargie and keep your smartphone’s battery healthy, longer.
In today’s world, our smartphones are almost like extensions of ourselves. But, have you ever stopped to think about the environmental impact of these indispensable gadgets? Producing just one smartphone can emit around 55 kg of CO2. With billions in use, that adds up fast, making it clear we need smarter solutions.
That’s where Chargie comes in. More than just a gadget, Chargie is our pledge to do better for our planet. By optimizing how and when your phone charges, it doesn’t just extend your battery’s life—it plays a part in cutting down the need for new phones and, with that, the hefty carbon footprint that comes from making them.
Here’s the scoop: by using Chargie, you could help your phone’s battery last up to 4 years. This means fewer phones tossed out, less demand for new ones, and a big win for the environment. Imagine the impact if 50,000 of us used Chargie. We’re talking about saving around 5,500 metric tons of CO2. That’s like taking over 1,200 cars off the road for a whole year! Chargie’s manufacturing simplicity made it very environmentally sound, as the whole production process emitted just a little over 2kg of CO2 per device in 2024.
But it’s not just about the numbers. It’s about making choices that are good for our world. Chargie isn’t just a product; it’s a statement. A statement that says we care about our planet and we’re ready to take action, even in the smallest of ways.
So, let’s charge towards a greener future together. Every little bit helps, and with Chargie, you’re not just charging your phone—you’re powering change. Join us, and let’s make a real difference, one charge at a time.
Here’s a Nokia 8.3 phone with its case popping off like an overfilled suitcase. The battery inside is looking like it’s ready to burst out. This particular phone comes straight from our friends over at Nokia Labs, the tech wizards who once were the #1 phone makers. Now phonemaking is not their #1 priority anymore, but they excel at other areas of mobile innovation, like 5G network development.
As an iPhone owner, you’re no stranger to the frustration of battery degradation, especially when it affects your overall user experience or forces you to replace your device sooner than you’d like. Chargie, our overnight charging limiter, significantly slows down battery degradation, helping you get the most out of your iPhone’s battery life. In this article, we’ll dive into realistic best and worst-case scenarios and crunch the numbers to demonstrate how much you could potentially save by using Chargie.
Best-Case Scenario:
Let’s start with a scenario where an iPhone user experiences relatively minor battery degradation (10% per year). Without Chargie, the battery will lose 10% capacity each year. Assuming that you would consider replacing your $1500 iPhone when the battery capacity drops below 50%:
Three years ago, I had no idea what Chargie was going to become – world’s #1 phone battery protection system. I knew the basic principles of charge limiting and the positive outcomes it has on battery health, but at that point in 2019 they were only theoretical, or based on what others had studied.
Now, there are over 27,000 Chargie devices out there and countless testimonials of people using it and telling us (publicly or over email) how Chargie had changed the entire course of their battery life and how it saved them money, time and effort.
For the past three years, I’ve been preaching to people to not fully charge their phones, or do it as rarely as possible. Well, all this time it seemed obvious to me (and some other battery-obsessed freaks) that you also shouldn’t let your phone discharge to 0, because it also causes harm to the battery (maybe even more than briefly letting it go to full).
One of the best perks modern society has is the instant fulfillment of everything: one-hour home delivery, home office, ultra-fast charging of batteries of devices ranging from smart watches and phones to electric cars.
picture (c) techadvisor
Electric cars and phones are not much alike, when it comes to battery management. The first have huge battery capacities and don’t ever fully charge nor discharge, have complex management and cooling systems, while the latter are mostly glass slabs with huge processing power and no cooling. What’s even worse is that they’re most of the time covered in a heat-insulating plastic cover. Why is that worse? It’s not for the phone’s aesthetics, obviously, but for the battery.
Aside our phones, most of us have a multitude of battery-powered devices laying around… not really using battery, but plugged in all the time.
After a while, that Bluetooth speaker, smart radio, smart watch, drone, your kids’ LEGO battery pack or even flash light… will not have the same battery it did when it was new. That’s because they’ve been kept plugged in A LOT. Which sucks, if you ask me, because it shouldn’t be like that – you should just plug them and they should stay healthy, since you don’t have to worry when to unplug each and every device you have around your home.
Very durable, non-flammable resin case (not plastic)
When you start manufacturing with no experience in manufacturing whatsoever, you have to learn from others and invent. And not be afraid to change the design when it makes sense. You want to make things happen, no matter how bad they might come out at first.
There are some people who might object to this point of view, but that’s the way it happens on so many levels, simply because every little thing you do requires experimentation and money, which all take time. And time is the only resource you have, really. Take a look at Tesla and compare their 2007 product with the newest Model 3 (different scales, I know, but the same phenomenon).
On the other hand, when Chargie started growing, other possibilities came along. Like it’s the case with our new resin printer, the Anycubic Mono X.
About resin printing
Resin printing is the culmination of technology advances in 2021, as far as I can see. The fact that it just became affordable is even more wonderful.
Basically, from bottom to top, you just have an UV lamp, a monochrome 4K LCD screen, a resin recipient with a very transparent bottom and an aluminum platform that goes up 0.05mm at a time with each layer. The 4K LCD opens and shuts its pixels according to the current layer’s image (you can compare this to a CT scanner’s image).
The result is that parts come out at hugely higher speed, since it doesn’t matter if you only do one or if you do 80 pieces at a time, the layer’s exposure time is the same (about 2 seconds).
A messy process that gives birth to the most wonderful creations ordinary makers couldn’t even dream of 5 years ago.
The fun fact is that the parts come out with an outstanding quality. You can extrude text that only has 2mm height, you can do a lot of things you really can’t do with classic FDM printers, with 30 times more speed (only depends on the screen’s size). Your parts don’t bend, don’t melt at 50 degrees Celsius and are not flammable. And you can use a neutral base resin (transparent or opaque white) which you can colour to your liking, and you get translucent or opaque parts. Very neat.
The not to fun fact is that the resin is more expensive than PLA filament, that you have to wash the resulting parts with isopropyl alcohol for 10 minutes, then expose them to sunlight (or a UV lamp) for another couple of minutes on each side, to perform a final curing of the resin. All in all, the entire process is much messier than FDM but again, the resulting pieces’ quality is outstanding.
When things go bad, though, you’ve just lost 80 half-cases and almost half a kilo of resin, which is quite a lot (the one below just happened as I was writing this and the resin from the vat finished, leaving some of the parts incomplete).
Things got bad here. Really bad.
Starting out small
At first, Chargie’s cases were made out of heat-extruded PLA at about 200 oC. If you do it slowly, the parts come out very nicely, but you need to go slooooow. Which is not an option for even small-batch production processes, or you need dozens of printers doing the same thing and eating a huge amount of energy. And you can’t have layer heights of just 0.05mm like you do in resin printing, since the layers are really printed one at a time.
A typical PLA-printed part
The advantage, though, is that you can change your mind whenever you feel like, and you don’t have to spend a fortune on new plastic molds. They DO NOT come cheap (5-figure numbers), and can only be made by specialist engineers, pose very high quality issues when they don’t make them well and you really don’t have any control over their quality until the next batch, thus making the feedback very delayed and so 20th century. On the other hand, 3D-printing, whichever flavour you choose, is very flexible and its quality is all under control, with bearable quirks (I’m talking about FDM, because resin’s quality is already outstanding and can be compared to top-notch plastic casing).
So for a startup in 2021, resin-based 3D printing is the only way out of this issue with the least amount of investment.
A typical resin-printed part
Serving the purpose
For Chargie, which is a device that most of the time sits hidden under a bed, casing quality is not functionally important – it has to be there to give the device mechanical sturdiness, but otherwise I thought FDM printing is a good tradeoff between price and quality.
The visual qualities of a product are, on the other hand, the ones that impress most, and I can say it loud now that I’ve never looked back at PLA printing once I started doing resin.
Chargie is now ready for medium volume production. 2021’s chip crisis is another big hit on production from Lighty Electronics to Tesla and Samsung, but that’s a story for another post.
The last hundred of the first thousand Chargie A lot
On November 10, we announced the new Chargie A.
It more or less does the same thing as Chargie Founder Edition, but more accurately and now it also measures the power drawn from your charger and displays it in the app. On top of that, I added functionality that cuts off power below a configurable threshold, or above a certain limit, to protect power surges or short circuits. Of course, your phone and charger also have this, but an extra protection measure is never bad. Android Auto support has also been implemented in hardware, a function waited by so many.
We had a few issues with the PCB assembly factory in China that led to a big delay (about a month) in deliveries. However, that is now history. All of the Chargies have been put into cases (still 3D-printed for now) and now they’ve shipped all over the world to the patient customers who waited dearly.
The effort has been huge – over 18 hours a day of work, answering to emails and making sure everything goes as planned, including finishes to the firmware, app and hardware. We even had to change all of the quartz crystals in every device, because of a human error at one of our parts suppliers.
But here we are. We prioritized UK deliveries because they’re going out of the EU on Jan 1st, and there’s no telling right now of how customs officials will behave after that date. So we packed them in one big parcel on Thursday and shipped them to a trusting partner in London via DHL, who re-shipped individual packs using Royal Mail’s next-day delivery with a tracking number, which means UK customers who preordered up to Dec. 19 will receive them first. I think we will implement this type of shipping with other countries too. Customs formalities are more complicated than with DHL if it’s not an EU country, but it might just work better in the long run. So expect a new, hybrid, piggybacked delivery method that’s faster, cheaper and better than normal post.
Well, not everyone’s experience has been the same. Others wanted to give out Chargies for Christmas, but unfortunately it wasn’t possible. However, this is not the norm and we’ll try to do better next time. I’m sorry for all those ruined plans. Our next stock will be double (we hadn’t expected such a surge in orders) and we will continue to restock well before it’s over.
I’m personally glad that the Chargie idea caught so well and that people are aware of their batteries’ degradation and want to protect what they already own. This is anti-consumerism at its finest.
So yes, we’re shipping more than just a product. We’re shipping parts of our lives, thousands of hours of hard work, sleepless nights, early mornings and the promise to innovate further. Very few people can say they made it to this point – having an actual product that sprung out of their minds, then make it and ship it to real customers, who use it in their real lives.
Thank you for all your patience, trust and involvement in the Chargie project. It means a lot and it fuels its own progress and the other innovative gadgets I have in mind.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!
Ovidiu Sandru
🎉 40% Bulk Pack Discount on any Chargie, only today!
