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).
To recap, the three causes that accelerate lithium ion battery degradation are:
- heat (while charging or discharging)
- prolonged full charging
- deep discharging
Chargie protects your battery from the harmful effects of prolonged full charging, but it can’t do anything about deep discharges. Those are to be handled by the user, unless the phone is constantly connected to external power and its charging process completely handled by the Chargie app.
However, there is one instance when you should fully charge your phone: if the battery doesn’t hold a charge until you know you can plug it again.
In those cases, PLEASE charge to 100%, through Chargie, because it will cut off power completely at the top and not keep trickle charging it any longer. This process alone lets the battery’s chemistry relax, the ions to settle and the heat to dissipate in a matter of minutes. Cutting off power completely at 100% also puts most phones into deep sleep, which means the CPU won’t be providing heat to the battery any longer.
Of course, the technique is not as effective as charging to 80%, but is the next best thing to charge limiting. You can also use the delayed charging function (called Top Up Scheduler) in the Android app (coming to iOS this fall) for better results.
We’ve experimented the above with our test phones, and the results have been quite revealing.
You could as well choose to do this manualy – plug in and stay attentive to see when the battery is full, then unplug immediately once it gets there. You can do that, but Chargie does it automatically, and that’s why it’s loved by more than 17000 users worldwide, as of today.
Buy a Chargie now at https://chargie.org/chargie-shop/
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