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Battery - Best Practice

qwerty78

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Should one charge the battery to 100% ? Or less than that say 90% full?

And is full power charging via wall charger or a slow trickle charge via PC USB port better?
 
I plug it in every night when I got to bed, regardless of where it's at. I leave it plugged in until morning. I've never had a battery go prematurely bad. I've been doing this since my first iPhone (iPhone 4). When it comes to modern phones, no need to overthink charging. The people making the phone already have it all worked out.
 
For every one piece of good information out there, there are at least 10 pieces of incorrect to flat out bad information out there concerning this subject. Still can't figure out why so many people post things that have no scientific, real world backing or simply gloss over why things work the way they actually do.

Heck even the article When to charge your iPhone or iPad - Apple Community has some glaring issues.

1) Consumer grade lithium ion batteries can't be killed nor do they go "flat". At approximately 2.7v the batteries internal safety trips and disconnects the ability be used. It takes a device to override that safety feature and return the battery to a working state. This safety feature was created due to the chemical state that battery enters into when you try to charge it at that low of a level. Basically it needs a trickle charge to get it back into a safe range before it can then have a stage 1 (max amperage) charge applied.

2) iPhones only need .5 amps, not the 1 amps stated, to charge. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to charge off a USB 1.0 port (which is limited under the original specification to only provide .5 amps for operation).

3) While the article states that stage 1 charging ends at 75% it actually ends at 70% per the consumer grade lithium ion specification. I did an article on this back in 2012 that proves that fact iPhone Mythbusting! Let's separate the facts from the fiction.


Now here's a really fun fact that most people don't realize. Try not to use the phone too much while it is actually charging. It's bad, m'kay. Especially when you get near a full charge. The load on the battery as it is both charging and being used will cause the battery to heat up (which is different than the CPU/GPU and screen heating up). This heat will change how the circuit charges the battery. Why? Because for a battery to be properly tested for capacity it must be at rest. Any other state introduces variables that can't be accounted for by a modern charging circuit. And that can cause mini stage 2 charging cycles for no reason, which puts stress on the battery. To the point of causing the cathode of the battery to start platting. Which is bad because then the battery can't charge at the full rate nor when the platting becomes bad enough charge to a full capacity.

Any article that you read that says "Pull the phone off the charger as soon as it hits 100%" or "Don't let your phone charge overnight" is basically BS. No one has actually scientifically proven that as a fact (No one wants to spend the money to test it). In fact, stage 4 charging (top off) is done at such a low current that it won't stress the battery. It was designed that way from day one.

One last thing, anyone that uses "Industrial grade lithium ion batteries" specifications and tries to apply them to "Consumer grade lithium ion batteries" is mixing apples and oranges. The lithium ion batteries in cars don't have the safety protocols or heat restrictions of a phone battery.
 
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