Stop Charging Your Phone Overnight

Stop Charging Your Phone Overnight

If you’re like most people, right before you drift off to sleep you connect your cell phone to a charger, ensuring full battery power for the following day.  However, this habit of charging your phone overnight might be killing your phone’s battery.

When you charge your phone overnight, the long-term battery capacity becomes less and less with each overnight charge, quicker than if you simply charged your phone thirty minutes at a time.  With today’s fast charge technology, 30 minutes is usually all it takes to fully bring your cell phone battery to full capacity.

Keeping any battery plugged in for an extended period of time will shorten the life of the battery. The good news is you can’t overcharge your phone battery.  Once your battery is charged to 100% the hardware inside shuts off the charge. However, once the charge is shut down a “trickle charge” starts to take place.

Let me try to explain what happens when you leave your phone charging all night.  Once your phone battery reaches 100% charged a “trickle charge” takes place until you wake in the morning and take the phone off the charger.  A “trickle charge” is where once your phone reaches the 100% charge status, the charger keeps topping off the charge.  So, your phone battery is constantly switching from 100% to a little less charge, hence the “trickle charge” to keep it at 100%.

You won’t notice any battery damage immediately, but in two to three years you will notice your battery isn’t staying charged as long. If you purchase a new phone every year or so this won’t affect you.  However, if you plan on keeping your phone until your phone has become a dinosaur of phones, you will see a huge difference in how long your battery stays charged.

How to Keep your phone battery healthy

• Never wait to charge your phone until it gets close to a 0% battery charge.
• Charge your phone once or twice a day when the charge gets to 35% or 40% to stop the “trickle charge” damage.
• Keep your phone out of the sun and never charge it under pillows or blankets, as heat damages your phone battery.

Until Next Time,

Meagbite