Essential Tips to Extend Battery Life of your Smartphone and other devices

While most of us make efforts to preserve battery power on our devices to keep them from going off, we overlook the fact that batteries also need care to be kept healthier and perform well for a prolonged time. If proper measures are taken care of we can make our batteries to last longer and slow down the process of degradation in performance that happens overtime.

This article is not about how to save battery power but it’s about taking proper care of the battery so that it could perform well for a longer time period. And given the fact that smartphone’s and tablets with replaceable batteries are becoming more rare nowadays, you need to know how to keep your batteries healthier and prolong their life.

Almost all the devices manufactured these days uses lithium-ion batteries which are different from nickel-metal-hydride batteries which were required to go from full charge to full discharge to be kept healthier. Caring of lithium-ion batteries is done differently, matterfact, totally opposite to that of nickel-based batteries. So you need to forget the tips and tricks that you learned about taking care of batteries in the early days of cellphones, technology has changed a lot and so has the methods of taking care of it.

icon-flash TIPS TO EXTEND BATTERY LIFE OF YOUR SMARTPHONES AND TABLETS

There’s not just one single factor to take care of the lithium-ion based batteries used in your smartphones and tablets. From charging cycles to storage temperature, there’s a lot to say on proper caring of lithium-ion batteries.

KEEP YOUR BATTERY HANGING IN BETWEEN 40-80%

Don’t let your device’s battery go all the way down to zero percent. It’s going to effect your battery’s life negatively. It’s advised to not let it go below 40 percent, and not let it charge to a complete 100%. Keeping it hanging in between 40-80% is the right way of charging your lithium-ion battery.

However it could be difficult to follow that routine, almost impossible for some of us, but we can try to be near that routine at-least or follow one simple rule — don’t let the battery go down to 0% and don’t charge it completely to 100%, if we could follow even this, we’d be giving a good enough recharge cycle to the battery.

[quote]Charging a battery that has been kept discharged for several months could blast it off![/quote]

Lithium-ion batteries can get seriously unstable at zero percent and more if kept in that state for several months, so much that even charging them again could blast them off! However, the safety measures implemented on the battery takes care of that. Lithium-ion batteries ships with built-in self-destruct circuits that can disable the battery instantly in case an explosive situation is detected. And by disable I meant destroying the battery forever, leaving you with the only choice of getting a new battery.

DON’T LET YOUR BATTERY GET HOT

Lithium-ion batteries should not be exposed to heat. Nothing would degrade your battery’s life as much as heat would, it’s the worst enemy of a lithium-ion battery. Ideal temperature to keep your battery in is 20 -25 degrees Celsius.

How to avoid heat?

[quote]Heat is the worst enemy of lithium-ion based batteries[/quote]

Here are a few things to take care of to avoid letting your device’s battery get hot:

• Don’t use your device while it’s charging
• Don’t ever play games on your device while it’s charging. Gaming is a very resourceful activity — demanding a lot of battery power, which is something you should never ask for while the battery is charging.
• Don’t leave your device in direct sunlight or hot cars for long.
• If your device gets hot, restart it (switch off & on) right away.
• Overcharging your device could also make the battery to go hot, try to avoid that

Avoid wireless charging: While wireless charging is by far the most convenient way of charging your device. It’s also seriously flawed when it comes to keeping your device’s battery life from degrading. Wireless chargers tend to generate waste heat while charging your device, which heats up the battery as long as the device is charging. And this gets worse if you’re environment is already warm.

THE RIGHT WAY TO STORE BATTERIES

If you’ve a battery or a device that you know you’re not gonna use for the coming weeks or months, then you need to know the right way to store them to keep their performance from degrading. Although, there’s no denying that batteries tend to degrade overtime whether stored properly or not, but it’s easily possible to slow down the degradation process by a fair margin if proper measures are taken care of while storing the batteries.

You shouldn’t store batteries by charging them to a full 100%. It only causes oxidation of lithium-ion at the highest possible rate, causing the battery to discharge quickly. Instead, you should keep the battery at around 40% of charged state before storing it for a prolonged time. And it’s best to store the battery in a refrigerator (not freezer) to keep it in an ideal temperature.

CALIBRATE YOUR BATTERIES ONCE IN EVERY 30 DAYS

Calibration allows for accurate reporting of battery power left in a device. We see it as “64% battery left” or  with some advanced apps “2 hours 15 minutes left”. It’s believed that over the time with several shallow recharges (which is recommended for lithium-ion batteries) this reporting stops being accurate, and to fix that re-calibration of the battery is required.

To re-calibrate the battery, you first need to do a complete discharge to 0% and then charge it up all the way to 100%. This will re-calibrate your battery to show correct stats in your device’s battery information setting. But remember to do it only once in every 30 days.

FINAL THOUGHTS

There’s no denying the fact that your lithium-ion battery’s performance would degrade overtime, we could not do anything to stop that from happening. But by following the measures discussed above, we could surely slow down the process of degradation caused to batteries by the day-to-day usage of our devices.

Source: Battery University