Most high-quality LiPo-powered devices already do this at the hardware-level. The 100% level you see on the software is usually 80% actual charge on the battery.
Any way to tell? I just got a monster phone with a 22K mAh battery.
For Android, there are a multitude of apps, such as Wattz that will tell you the actual voltage of the battery. Full may be 4.2V or 4.35V depending on the chemistry used. ACCA (root required) will let you limit charge rates and stop charging at a certain percentage.
Staying under 4 volts (around 60% for most phone batteries) will vastly extend battery service life. 80% is a bit less extension, but still far better than charging to 100%.
i was looking for something like acca since forever
foss discoverability needs some mad work
I just use Home Assistant + smart switch
how do you do it?
Just set up an automatic to turn the switch off when the battery reaches 80%. Then back on when <75%.
that doesn’t answer the question of whether there’s a way to tell that their battery is limited to 80% on hardware level, though.
Unless it’s lying about the voltage itself, you can be pretty sure it’s not limited if it charges to 4.35V. 4.2 is a little more tricky if you don’t know for sure whether 4.2 is the full voltage for the cell.
omg kilo milliampere
k = 10^3 and m = 10^-3 so they will cancel out. It’s just Ah without any prefixes at that point.
Charge it from a smart power supply from battery at 1 to 100% then it can show you the number of mah/h it took to charge it.
I have this power supply which also has USB-C https://a.aliexpress.com/_mrChiQ6
Not sure how accurate this would be as charging is not 100% efficient. Also the amount of power the phone uses while charging would have to be taken into account as well.
My phone has a 10.8Ah battery and it’s huge, no idea how big that must be.
22Ah at 4.35V would be 96Wh, which iirc is just under the limit of 100Wh you can take on flights in the us, and thus the limit for basically all laptops.
mAh are a terrible way to measure capacity, look for watt-hours instead. You need to know the voltage for it to be a relevant measurement
So can I charge my phone to 11?
It’s one more than ten, so yeah, it’s better.
Yea that’s what I’ve heard, and I personally keep stuff plugged in
It was a recent article by iFixit, so I thought I’d share it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Isn’t the charge limit of the battery arbitrary? The manufacturer can set whatever target voltage they want , so it’s meaningless to say they limit the battery to 80% when they decide what 100% is.
Yes
80% “software” should keep the battery even healthier…
Do you have sources?
I don’t doubt the fact that they take some margin to extend the lifetime of the battery, but if we take iPhones as an example, they:
- charge at a slower rate when nearing 100%
- try to postpone charging the final 20% until the last moment before disconnecting from the wall outlet
- can be software capped at 80% by the user (in newer models)
This makes me suspect that that the margin between what’s reported in software as 100% and the actual capacity of the battery is less than 20%. This also makes sense from the standpoint of the consumer expecting a long battery life on their expensive high-end device, putting pressure on the companies to make the margin smaller and the charging algorithms smarter. Just my observations, of course.
Just build phones with the understanding that batteries are consumables and make them easy to replace and standardized. Then swap in a new $5 battery when you need to so. Make the raw materials reclaimable too of course.
Sure, but let’s also preserve current batteries as long as possible so we can lower our carbon foot print. We need to do both.
Do most people not have the option to protect their battery already?
I think that’s a Samsung feature
It’s built into my pixel as well. Shrug
You have an older Pixel or just rooted, maybe? My 7 on the latest vanilla Android doesn’t seem to have it, and this thread seems to say it’s not available in the stock os.
Is called adaptive charging
It’s on my pixel 7 pro at least
Ah, I see. I was focused on the 80% limiter for that “Maximum” setting, which I think is not an option on Pixel. But I see now that “Adaptive Charging” sounds like it does what that middle setting “Adaptive” does.
“Sleep time is estimated based on your usage patterns”
These systems exist on pretty much all modern phones, but they all work the same (shitty) way, by assuming your schedule is exactly the same every day and giving you zero programmable control.
And on iPhone the system expects you want your battery to charge over 80% on a daily basis. On a Samsung phone the system knows you don’t want to go past 80% at all, so it sets that as the new maximum.
To be clear, you are still taking about rechargeable batteries right? I agree those should be replaceable. I sure as hell don’t think phone should use single use batteries!
Yes, 18650 or a standardized rectangular equivalent.
A standard would be nice… I mean all phones are basically the same size and shape.
If you don’t ever charge it to over 80% then it’s effectively already degraded 20% since the day you got it. I’ll rather just use it as intented and then replace the battery when it no longer holds charge. That’s just one of the reasons I didn’t buy one with built in battery.
But increasingly the batteries are glued in.
Thanks to EU this will be changing in the near future. Personally I’m one of the stubborn ones who refused to buy devices with non-removable batteries and by the looks of it I will never have to either. Hopefully this applies to the headphone jack aswell.
The USB C to audio jack is ok. I’d like to have replaceable batteries, but my last few phones there wasn’t one that had that and what else I wanted. I had to compromise. Glad the EU is forcing things to improve.
I strongly disagree.
I have yet to buy a phone without a headphone jack.
I’ve got earphones that are 17 years old and sound great. An audio jack in the car that connects way faster than Bluetooth. A hifi older than me.
The amount of electrical waste and incompatibilities caused by ditching a universal standard is not small.
The standard still usable, you just need an adaptor. I don’t because Android Auto is my car navigation anyway, so it might as well do audio for podcasts. If I’m out and about, or doing house stuff, my bluetooth ear piece means I can listen to podcasts without wires in the way. At work, I’ve not used wired headphones since forever. I subconsciously chewed the cable and kept pushing out my chair to roll over somewhere forgetting the wire.
Adapters are more electric thrash.
Not really, as it’s a standard you could keep the adaptor longer than the phone. Adaptors keep legacy stuff in use, extending their lives.
So how do you charge your phone while listening to music? Plug a splitter dongle into your headphone dongle? When this could be built into your phone? Yes a compromise.
Yer a cable that has both a male USBC and a female USB C and audio Jack. Easy. It’s not worth limiting phone options for. Plus mainly I use bluetooth anyway.
Increasingly I buy fairphones
I nearly did, but I wanted to try GrapheneOS. Until now I’ve been LinageOS without Google (over a decade), but I’ve had to compromise and wanted to reduce how much that compromised me.
I know sooner or later I’ll have to degoogle. Maybe once I know the first thing about how to run my home server I’ll get to it.
Nextcloud fills a lot of the hole. I still use Google as little as I can, but I was bumping into apps that were are hard requirement to do things. Banking apps (no seperate security device anymore), EV charger apps (old chargers don’t all have simple card payment) is just two classes.
We have a real issue here. The duopoly of Google and Apple is being reenforced by infrastructure requiring apps. Regulators need to wake up.
It’s a whole system of bad incentives, yeah. I’ll make a note to look into nextcloud, thanks!
I use Nextcloud for my auto-photo uploads, calendars, contacts, notes and passwords. I’ve been using it at least 8 years. It’s great. 😃
I’ve never seen an unreplaceable battery. Most phones use a glue that is easily removed with pull-tabs.
That being said it’s still a far cry from the devices of yore where you just popped off the back cover and slapped a new one in.
I watched videos on it for my previous phone. You had to use a heat gun to warm the glue but not heat it too much or you damage the screen. It was a bit of a knife edge temperature wise. Plus you then had to take most of the phone apart to get at the battery. It just wasn’t practical. Replacing the screen looked better, but was as easy as it was on an old phone I did. This stuff just isn’t designed with repair in mind.
I replaced the battery in a 2016 iPhone SE and it was hell. Microsurgery to get the phone apart, multiple attempts at undoing the glue, and at the end the home key didn’t work. Result: upgraded phone.
I miss the form factor off my HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 for Americans). It had a neat, flip-out keyboard, swappable batteries, and a compact, 3.7 inch display.
but that’s an incommensurable, fallacious comparison. What the article talks about is battery life, not single charge duration
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Here’s my headline: Why obsessing over battery degradation is unhealthy and you should just do whatever is easiest for you
“hey here is a way to increase the life of your battery by possibly 400%.”
“OMG! Why are you obsessing over this!”
Seriously how dare they try to help us and educate us!
the 400% figure is extremely misleading and based on old assumptions and old battery tech.
Also it you’re not keeping the phone for 20 years then it doesn’t make sense to calculate “total electrons” over the absolute entirety of the battery “life”.
Agreed. If you’re a device maker and you haven’t considered the possibility of your users plugging in their devices for long periods of time in your design, then i feel that’s on you to improve your product.
I have enabled the option to limit charging to 85% on my Samsung, and last weekend I needed it to last for 2 days so I charged it to 100%. Easily made it. It’s nice to know you have that 100% when you need it .
I don’t like this article because it misses some of the more important details around how to lengthen your device’s life and why you may or may not want to keep your battery at a specific state of charge.
- State of charge is pretty arbitrary, your charging circuit could charge between 3.0V and 4.2V (pretty typical), or it could charge between 3.2V and 4.0V and still show 4.0V as being 100% charge. Different chemistries can have slightly (or significant in the case of LFP) different voltages. The cynic in me wouldn’t be surprised if eventually 100% becomes ~4.35V because it makes their device look better to tech reviewers, but then have it default to only charge to 4.2V because it still gives suitable device life.
- The most important factors in how long your device’s battery will last are temperature and how deeply you discharge the battery. Discharging your phone down until it dies does way more damage than keeping it charged at 100%.
- At some point practicality comes into it, you would get even more total energy out of a cell if you kept it between 40% and 60% all the time, but obviously it isn’t very practical to only use 20% of your phone’s available capacity in day to day use.
- Consider how long you are storing your device. If it is always plugged in or won’t be used for months, then something like 40% to 60% would be a more suitable state of charge to keep your device at if possible. If it sits on your desk and you need to unplug it periodically and know you don’t need the full charge, then sure keep it at 80%.
Personally, I don’t stress about the batteries in my devices at all. I generally keep an eye on the power and plug it in when convenient, but target plugging it in before it gets too far below 50%. I’ve historically had almost zero issues with the batteries in my devices wearing out before I’m ready to replace it for other reasons unless it started out with marginal battery life.
Yep. Battery chemistry is a real pain in the ass. Every few years someone spins a wheel and determines the next big thing that everyone needs to do to prevent batteries from dying early. For a while people were told full cycles were healthy for avoiding cell memory. Now more sporadic cycles are being peddled.
Use the device as you need it. If you complete a full cycle, cool; if not, that’s fine. Just don’t let the damn thing completely die and don’t keep it permanently on charge. Those are the common things most people do on accident that can really screw up a cell.
It isn’t spinning a wheel though, the advice hasn’t changed in decades (I’ve written something like the above comment at least a dozen times on Reddit since 2008 when I worked in the industry). Rather you might be getting it confused with other cell chemistries. Memory is a problem for NiCd cells, which were popular a long time ago, but even once we moved to NiMH for most things and then Li-ion there is no concern about it. Unfortunately there is a ton of incorrect and bad information out there about batteries so it is hard to wade through the crap and find the real information.
https://batteryuniversity.com is the best resource I know for correct information about li-ion cells, since it is written and maintained by a company that designs battery testing equipment.
Part of the problem is the game of telephone drops the cell chemistry related to the method almost immediately leading to general consumers applying it as a blanket rule for all batteries
Interesting source though…
About 4, I’d start long term storage from 80% because self-discharge rate is 30% per year in room temperature, or 15% per year in the fridge, which is the best storage temperature. Also, Battery University said in some article that 65% charge is optimal for storage, which is ~3.95V/cell at rest for most chemistries.
The reason I said 40-60% is because over that entire range both self-discharge and permanent capacity loss happen at their slowest rates because that is the flat range of the voltage curve where the cell is close to its nominal 3.7V voltage. The self-discharge with starting at 80% will maybe buy you an extra couple months before the cell becomes unusable, but you would experience more irreversible capacity loss.
Yeah, that’s been my whole experience surrounding people being upset that batteries aren’t able to be replaced in phones anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a good habit, but I’ve never had a phone long enough for the battery’s life to degrade to the point where that degradation was more than mildy noticeable.
It can also depend on the device. I’ve had smaller devices and have had to charge multiple times a day. After getting a bigger phone with a bigger battery. I simply don’t think about it anymore. I imagine my phone dying before the battery does or even if it does, I’ll pay for a replacement if needed. I’d rather not stress in the day to day.
At the risk of sounding like Spinal Tap, why don’t they just make the chargers stop at 80% and have the interface show 100%?
Edit: woops. Appears that’s already a thing.
Sony phones have a setting called Battery Care that lets you choose 80%, 90% or 100% as the max.
Damn, some of you must have pretty chill lives if paying attention to what level your battery charge is at DAILY is something you want to add to your plates. I mean sure, if there was a setting that allowed you to have the phone automatically cut charging at 80% this might be worth thinking about. But when I charge my phone its during times when I dont have to think about it (Aka 90% of the time, when I’m asleep)
Samsung has this option, called Battery Protect I think. There’s also the Accubattery app which will set an alarm to go off once it reaches 80 pct. I’m with you though, unless the phone itself shuts off charging, it’s too much to manage even with an alarm.
S23 Ultra: Protect Battery - 85 percent toggle
I tried it before but my anxiety was always going . Thinking to try again.
I’ve stopped charging my phone overnight which I typically advise people against but also keep a charger at my desk. My phone actually has a battery saver setting that cuts charging at 85%.
Overnight is literally the easiest and most natural slot to do so. Whether or not its most optimal is not whats important, I’ll just seek out brands that aknowledge this reality and build their hardware and software around this
What kind of phone do you have. Samsing, Apple and Pixel all have solutions.
The used prixel I got recently automatically only charges to 80% if an alarm is set, then charges the rest of the way to hit 100% when the alarm goes off.
My pixel (5a) only does adaptive charging if your alarm is set for the A.M. If you’re second or third shift, it doesn’t even try. There’s no way to turn it on even in developer options. It was a pretty big wtf when I figured that one out.
Its more I’m lazy. I’m on a ROG Phone 3, and as a gaming phone it probably has that feature. I’m moreso just arguing that if this is still an issue batteries face, tech should address it and fin solutions for how to get around the most common form of charging which is plugging it in and doing something else, which inherently means you ARENT watching what charge its at and have little control over when it stops charging
True, of course the simplest and easiest solution is the one that takes the least amount of thinking and effort.
My only issue is there are brands that try to build around this but it’s incredibly difficult. I understand iPhones have some kind of smart charging that’s supposed to charge slowly but stop until it learns when it thinks you’ll need it and finish charging just before then. However, that relies on consistent data and consistent routine and I would think that could potentially be quite inaccurate if you have a more inconsistent routine. I don’t think I’ve seen a better implementation yet unfortunately.
It’s just become second nature to me to watch for and charge my phone so certain times. I feel like that’s just a part of owning a mobile device.
Yeah, thats kind of my point. Plugging your phone in every night when you go to bed is a pretty natural and low thought way of charging any electronic device
My phone has exactly this (oneplus 9 pro) but it works only when there is a full moon and the next Friday is the thirteen’s day of the month, plus some other unknown requirements
I’ve a one plus Nord 2 5g and it has optimised charging at night but it doesn’t come on every night I charge it and it does feel like there’s some arcane shit needed for it to work at times.
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I plug all my devices directly into the power line pole outside; everything charges to 75000%
Before spontaneously combusting
Depends who you ask. To manufacturers it’s a brilliant idea. It’s not a mystery that no electrical engineer knows that Li-Ion batteries don’t like to be fully charged. It’s just that manufacturers realized that charging 100% means you battery will die at around 2 year mark or 600-1000 charge cycles and that will be enough push for some people to buy a new device while at the same time your device seems to last longer on a single charge. Charging to 80% or 85% significantly extends life span of a battery. At that point chemistry almost doesn’t degrade.
And it’s not just with mobile devices and batteries that this is happening. Engineering with a plan to fail at specific time has become a precise science. Making something that will last forever is not that difficult, just not lucrative to them. Take for example LED lights. Manufacturer states 50k hours at 3.1V for white LED. Reduce that voltage down to 2.5V and you have basically made it infinite but it glows less, so to compensate you’d have to add more LEDs and that hits their income. Big Clive has a great video on the subject.
This should not only result in government regulation where artificial battery killing is prohibited, it should result it jailing execs who decided this was a good idea.
I don’t know, I have a bunch of years old Sony Konion vtc5 and vtc6 18650s, they’re constantly loaded and drained, I guess some have thousands of cycles. Of course, they’re not new anymore, but even my oldest ones, 7 years plus, are ok. They still give 34 ampere for quite some time, so no problems here. Got some even older no-name ones in akku packs, 10 years old, not so many cycles, no problems there either. Maybe because I never charged them quickly and with adaptive voltage?!?
There are 18650 batteries with protection circuit and without. It’s basically over-charge, under-charge and high temperature protection. More info. When charging any battery higher voltage means faster charge and it’s usually not a problem. What is a problem is heat generated. If you can’t dissipate heat fast enough, then you have a potential problem. Slower charging is always safer.
And all charging processes are adaptive voltage to a degree. Say you are charging 18650. Your charger will start with target voltage and constant current at 500mA, and watch the voltage in the battery raise. Once voltage reaches target it will remain constant but charge current will slowly drop. Once there’s no current going in, battery is full at that voltage level. Some chargers will push more current in, some will try higher voltage initially then switch to target voltage. Higher current can be a problem due to chemistry stability and heat but higher voltage should generally be safe. You can even revive some of the old batteries that no longer have any charge by shocking them with higher voltage shortly.
Also, good charger matters a lot.
Leaving a battery at 100% over a long time wasn’t recommended but I would imagine most devices have BMS settings to deal with this now.
I would imagine most devices have BMS settings to deal with this now.
There’s not much incentive to do that. Battery longevity reduces sales. Keeping the battery at 100% gives better review scores. It’s a lose lose for phone makers to implement that.
All BMSs I’ve come across have this disabled by default sadly, manufacturers seem to target longest device runtime, rather than extended battery longevity
On my FP3 it needs to be enabled in a terminal, while rooted (newer devices have it in the settings).
On my Steam Deck it also needs to be enabled in a terminal, the exact command differs depending on the model of steam deck. An embedded developer or tinkerer will find it very quickly in the kernel sysfs though.
Edit: Apple and Lenovo are the only companies I’m aware of, who have historically cared for the internal batteries in certain models of their laptops. Macbook Pros in particular used to behave differently when they reach 90%, some will stop charging and others will wait a few hours then resume charging to 100% depending on how the machine is used. I assume this is the only reason why my 2012 MBP still is going great on its original battery, running Linux of course.
Lenovo used to let you configure the charge preferences in the BIOS of their ThinkPad line
This was a decade ago though, can’t vouch for whether this applies to the modern stuff too
Laptop folks reading this - check your bios settings. My recent Dell (and I’m sure other brands are similar) has options for this. It has a “usually plugged in” setting, but I manually chose to limit charging to 80%, which is an option in the same place.
Obv if this is bad for your use case, don’t do it.
My lenovo legion laptop lets me limit charging to 60% for maximum battery longevity
The chemistry from holding that last 20% of charge for a while is what causes the degradation. The BMS can tell the system to stop charging before it’s full but it can’t do anything itself to prevent the cell from slowly being degraded by full charging.
This is is a problem that occurs on the order of years and that’s why the EV companies care but phones historically don’t. More easily replaceable batteries is the real solution here, not software stopping you from fully charging.
It is not the “real solution”. Increasing the battery longevity is much more sustainable than regularly replacing the battery, and is therefore the most rational and responsible course of action.
Yes, but to increase longevity energy density goes down substantially. Manufacturers (and many users including myself) would not make this decision for something as weight and size sensitive as a phone. The lithium ion batteries currently used already last for 2 years after all and are relatively small. A single model S battery contains 7104 individual cells for comparison. Further, lithium battery recycling has made substantial progress over the last year and will already need to be done at scale when higher volumes of EV batteries have reached their end of life. The impact of the of life phone batteries even from the entire world will be dwarfed by that of the 26 million EVs already on the roads today with thousands of cells each (or equivalent if using prismatic cells).
Some cars use LiFePO4 batteries for the superior longevity. But the range is reduced to somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 their lithium ion counterparts. The industry is moving away from this trend in recent years in favor of traditional lithium ion with a software limited charge/discharge range.
I have a new laptop that was complaining that I’d had it plugged in too long. Apparently there’s a battery management setting that will have it charge to 80% max. I’ve used laptops exclusively for like 15 years and this is the first one to complain about being plugged in constantly.
My Galaxy s22 has an option “battery protection” that limits my battery charging to 85%. Looks like they had a good idea there.
I didn’t realize I had this option. Thanks so much!
Same here. Battery still feels like new nearly 2 years later, and I use it as a GPS damn near 40 hours a week on top of normal usage. I like to run my phones into the ground these days, and the battery is almost always the first to go. Looks like I’ll be getting at least another 3 or 3 years out of this one.
So my battery is at 85 and Im Supposed to wake up to it at 50 instead of plugging it in? This is a engineering issue.
Your phone drains 35% while idle overnight?
They talk about Apple but Sony phones have had this feature for a while. In the settings you can choose whether the phone is always 100% charged, or whether it charges to 80% (or a custom %) or whether you want it full by the time you wake up.
I use the 3rd option. It stops charging when it gets to 90% and I tell it when I’m getting up, and just before it will charge up to 100 %.
Best of both worlds. Only ever having 80% to start is not nice because you get less juice during the day and need to charge by the evening. Plus battery anxiety. I’d rather have a 100% full battery.
Clearly newer, better battery tech is needed. Plus replaceable batteries.
Samsung, too.
I use it because I want my phone to last as long as possible, but the downside is that it won’t last a day so I have to charge in between. Ironic, isn’t it?
Very ironic.
That’s why I just tell it to be full by morning because I purposely bought a phone with a great battery . Why would I want to hamper it by 20%???
My samsung n20 ultra has the 85% charge option built in and I’ve always used it to keep my battery good. Back when it was easier to use custom roms in the 2010-2014 Era there was a lost of them that had custom “stop charging options” like it.
I also have fast/ultra fast charging disabled. If you don’t need to quickly charge your phone, it’s something else you should avoid.
For steam deck owners it gets a bit more complicated. SD has pass through charging, so once the battery is fully charged and also while it is plugged in, you aren’t powering it through the battery like cell phones and most laptops do. It’s just running off the USB c power, so if you usually play while plugged in, you aren’t cycling the battery, but you are having to allow it to fully charge.
SD has pass through charging, so once the battery is fully charged and also while it is plugged in, you aren’t powering it through the battery like cell phones and most laptops do.
That’s how nearly all modern devices work. Li-Ion can’t be charged and discharged simultaneously. There is circuitry to split the power between the battery and the device when it’s being charged.
Cheaper devices will just stop charging when you use them or they won’t work at all when plugged in.
This is flat out not true for most phones. Most phones will charge to 100% and continously charge/discharge if still plugged in. Over the last couple years there’s been some phones that will allow pass through/bypass charging. Iphones don’t do it at all. Only some android phones.
Yeah give your phone a 20% battery handicap out of the box because of your battery degredation paranoia. Dumbest shit ever.
I just charge my phone to full when it’s at like 20 and then unplug it when it’s done charging. Have had this phone for like 2 and a half years and I don’t have noticeable degradation, but it’s a flagship samsung phone so I know they typically have pretty good cells in them.
I hear the same argument about EVs, where many charge to 80%. Sometimes you need that extra juice, and by all means use it. Other times you’re only going to the grocery store, or sitting at your desk all day, and you can stay plugged in and you don’t really need that 20%. It’s no real skin off your nose either way.
Then, years from now when you need as much energy as your battery can give, you haven’t lost it to degradation and you really haven’t lost much along the way.
Why wait 10 years to get a 20% battery degradation when you can have it today!?
