The battery inside your phone is the heart; the little lithium filled mini Halloween candy bar sized heart.
Quick Points:
- Don’t buy cheap chargers; spend the extra money on original or other high quality alternatives.
- Try to let your phones battery die completely (0%) at least three times a week.
- Don’t expose your phone to extreme heat or cold.
Find out why by reading the full article!
Taking care of your battery is therefor important for longevity and performance just like taking care of your heart. To take car of your battery you should be using original chargers or high quality replacement chargers and not the $1.00 charger you find at the nearest corner store. The cheap low quality chargers can and WILL do damage to your device, it is only a matter of time. The cheap chargers will pump power into your device just like the original charger, but once the device reaches 100% the cheap charger will continue to pump power into the devices battery at the same intensity as when it was at 5%. The original charger supplied with your phone or sold for closer to $30 is more expensive because it has the technology to drop the output intensity once 100% charge has been accomplished and instead just charges at an output that simply maintains the full charge instead of continually trying to pump more and more into the battery. The problem here is overcharging with the cheap charger as a result is overcharging. Overcharging will reduce your batteries expected total cycle life and the overall daily performance. Overcharging in many cases will actually cause physical swelling of the battery cells, which packs incredible force. Force so strong that in our experience we have seen the power of a swelling battery pop the screen off of a phone on various occasions. In addition to the worry of reduced performance and damage to your expensive and invaluable smart phone there is an even more concerning reason for using high quality chargers, which is safety. The cheap chargers themselves have been known to smoke and even catch fire from time to time due to defects that are not prevented due to cost cutting slack quality assurance in their factories. We do many costly and advanced motherboard repairs and so we have seen countless phones come for charging IC repairs as a result of cheap chargers. We had one gentleman come in recently with three of his family’s phones, he had been on vacation and they bought a cheap charger, which they used for all three phones. The next time they went to charge the phones would not recognize the charger and when we diagnosed the phone we found an astonishing amount of motherboard damage as a result of a power surge, which the cheap charger could not prevent. What are the odds that your charger fries your motherboard or catches on fire and burns down your house? Probably not very high but with all things considered why take a chance for 25.00 savings when it could cost you a pricey motherboard repair at the very least.
So now you’re using your original high quality charger and you wonder, “what else can I do to extend the life expectancy of my battery and improve daily performance?”. Charge your phone only when its needed. We have such a dependence on our devices that the simple thought of a dead phone triggers anxiety so we often plug in our phones at 20%, 40%, EVEN 80%! By constantly charging our devices we are ensuring we never have a dead phone but ironically we are shortening the overall lifespan of the battery as well as the daily capacity with every premature charge. “Why does premature charging shorten battery life?” The best way to explain the negative effect of premature charging is to really simplify it and think of the lithium battery within your phone as a cup and the lithium within as water. When your battery is fully charged you have a full glass of water and when its dead the glass is empty. Now if you have a habit of filling your glass when it drops to 20% then what happens is the 20% that is never emptied “freezes” over time or in lithium terms solidifies and becomes unusable. This means that you have then taken the overall capacity from the full 100% 1500 Mah to 80% or 1200 Mah. This is the easiest way to explain how your battery life and capacity shortens over time. so “What can I do to prevent my battery life from shortening?”. There is no complete prevention for an continually decreasing battery capacity but your focus should be on reducing or slowing the affect and extending the overall life of the battery. To do this I recommend that you aim to first let your phone die completely (0%) three times per week. This will help to stimulate the bottom portion of the batteries lithium and keep it active and available as capacity. Second, as I talked about in the beginning of this article, use high quality chargers. Third, avoid extreme temperatures by leaving your phone in direct sunlight or out in the cold of winter.
For any further questions or concerns please do contact us at Phone Doctor for help. If you believe your current charger may be one of the cheap ones talked about in our article please also contact us to check and/or buy a high quality replacement to prevent battery life shortening or further damage. If you have experienced a phone that stopped charging, simply died completely and does not work or any other repair concerns please do CONTACT US!
I truly hope our readers find this information useful and I will continue to provide important information and tips when I can!