battery technology hasn’t advanced as fast as other technologies.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of incorrect information about batteries out
there.
Some of the big myths come from old battery technologies and are actively
harmful when applied to new battery technologies. For example, nickel-based
batteries needed to be fully discharged, while modern lithium batteries
shouldn’t be fully discharged.
Perform Shallow Discharges; Avoid Frequent Full Discharges
Old NiMH and NiCd batteries had a “memory effect” and had to be completely
discharged from 100% to 0% to keep their capacity. Modern devices use
Lithium Ion batteries, which work differently and have no memory effect. In
fact, completely discharging a Li-ion battery is bad for it. You should try
to perform shallow discharges – discharge the battery to something like
40-70% before recharging it, for example. Try to never let your battery go
below 20% except in rare circumstances.
If you were to discharge your battery to 50%, recharge it, and then
discharge it to 50% again, that would count as a single “cycle” with modern
Li-ion batteries. You don’t need to worry about performing shallow charges.
There’s only one problem that shallow discharges can cause. Laptops can get
a bit confused by shallow discharges and may show you wrong estimates for
how long your device’s battery will last. Laptop manufacturers recommend you
perform a full discharge about once per month to help calibrate the device’s
battery time estimate.
Heat (and Cold) Can Damage Batteries
Heat can reduce a battery’s capacity. This affects all types of devices –
even smartphones heat up when performing demanding tasks – but laptops can
become hottest of all when under load. The battery is in the laptop, near
the electronics that become hot while working heavily – this contributes to
battery wear.
If you have a laptop that you use plugged in all of the time and it gets
quite hot, removing the battery can increase the battery’s life by limiting
the battery’s exposure to the heat of your laptop. This won’t make too much
of a difference in normal use, but if you’re using a laptop to play a lot of
demanding games and it’s heating up quite a bit, it may be helpful. Of
course, this only applies to laptops with removable batteries.
Your climate is also a concern. If it gets very hot where you live or you
store your device somewhere that gets very hot – say, a hot car left in the
sun on a summer day – your battery will wear down faster. Keep your devices
near room temperature and avoid storing them in very hot places, such as hot
cars on summer days.
Extreme cold temperatures can decrease the lifespan of your battery, too.
Don’t put a spare battery in the freezer or expose any device with a battery
to similarly cold temperatures if you’re in a region with cold temperatures.
Don’t Leave the Battery At 0%
You shouldn’t leave the battery in a fully discharged state for very long.
Ideally, the battery wouldn’t discharge all the way to zero very often – but
if it does, you should recharge it as soon as possible. You don’t have to
race to a power outlet when your smartphone dies, but don’t throw it in your
drawer and leave it there for weeks without charging it. If you let the
battery discharge completely and leave your device in a closet, the battery
may become incapable of holding a charge at all, dying completely.
Store Batteries at 50% Charge
On the other hand, leaving the battery charged fully for an extended period
of time could result in a loss of capacity and shorten its life. Ideally,
you’d store the battery at 50% charge if you weren’t going to use it for a
while.
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