Ask Slashdot: How Can You Limit the Charging Range of Your Batteries? (linrunner.de) 129
"If you're anything like me, you've got a slew of devices with lithium-based batteries in them," write long-time Slashdot reader weilawei:
The conventional wisdom is to cycle them between 20 and 80% for a good compromise between usability and battery life. How then, do you automate the process to avoid over- or undercharging...? Do you remove and store your laptop battery at a medium charge when you run the laptop off an AC adapter?
You can keep checking your battery icon until it hits 80% -- but it seems like there should be an automated solution. The original submission notes TLP Linux Advance Power Management project -- but what solutions are Slashdot's readers using? Leave your best thoughts in the comments.
How can you limit the charging range of your batteries?
You can keep checking your battery icon until it hits 80% -- but it seems like there should be an automated solution. The original submission notes TLP Linux Advance Power Management project -- but what solutions are Slashdot's readers using? Leave your best thoughts in the comments.
How can you limit the charging range of your batteries?
There's an app for that.... (Score:3)
Seriously, I do this on my Android phone. It just depends on whether the maker lets you.
In HavocOS, which is based on LineageOS, the Battery Charge Limit just sets a value in a config file at a percentage of my choosing which stops charging.
On my Laptop I don't care. First, it's been paid for by my employer and second it's a Mac so I appreciate it dying as soon as possible so I can get something "better" (better being a relative term since all desktop operating systems are just garbage these days... however for the money of a macbook pro I should be getting much better hardware).
And just about all other applications in my life don't need that much power. Headphones I charge what, once or twice a week?
The Xiaomi Mi Max 3 has a large battery. I charge it every other day to about 85%. I'm interested to see whether I'll see a difference after two years.
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My old Samsung NC10+ laptop had a BIOS setting that would stop the battery changing at 80% to extend its service life in exchange for an hour's less run time... nice feature.
Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:2)
Re:There's an app for that.... (Score:5, Informative)
Careful, that charge limit function might actually be hurting your battery.
The worst thing for batteries is charge cycles, i.e. using them. Unless your phone has hardware capable of routing power from the charger then chances are that the charge limiter simply turns off the charger, running on battery power for a bit and then turning it back on to maintain the set charge level.
That would be really bad for the battery. Also unnecessary as most phones will do the 10-90% management for you, i.e. 0% and 100% on the gauge are actually 10% and 90% in reality.
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That is if you trust the phone maker. I don't. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually introduced extra cycles.
The tool says (!) it charges up to a limit I can set and then will only charge starting below another limit I can set. And sure enough in the morning I never see it charging.
Whether this works as advertised is anyone's guess of course.
Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:5, Informative)
Charge cycles aren't the worst thing for your battery; deep discharge/charge cycles are. You can do a 5% discharge dozens of times before doing as much damage as a single 80% discharge. Along with that, it's also really bad to keep the battery fully charged for extended periods, so the way most people charge their phones (plugging in overnight resulting in 6+ hours of 100% charge) is also not great.
On any rooted android phone you can install an app called "battery charge limit" which will allows you to specify at which point to stop the charge, and how much of a discharge to allow before charging again. I have mine set to stop at 85%, discharge down to 80%, and then charge again.
After 2 and a half years of use my current battery still has about 82% of it's initial capacity. If I hadn't been actively optimising the way it charges it would be down to 50% or less by now.
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Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:5, Informative)
On any rooted android phone you can install an app called "battery charge limit" which will allows you to specify at which point to stop the charge, and how much of a discharge to allow before charging again. I have mine set to stop at 85%, discharge down to 80%, and then charge again.
That's undoubtedly worse than simply charging to 100% and leaving it plugged in on any half way decently designed phone.
The 100% charge state will be more like 90% of the rated capacity anyway. If it's a multi-cell battery it creates an opportunity to balance the cells. It also means that the phone is not drawing from the battery and then charging and heating itself constantly.
82% after 2.5 years is very bad. The industrial standard for battery life is the time before reaching 80% remaining capacity, and your one is very nearly considered worn out and due for replacement. My 3.5 year old Pixel is still at 92%.
Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:1)
The 100% charge state will be more like 90% of the rated capacity anyway.
No, it won't. Phone manufacturers don't care about how often you have to replace the battery so they don't optimize for that. You can check this easily by looking at your battery voltage when it's reported at 100%. I haven't seen a single one which actually charges to a lower voltage.
If it's a multi-cell battery it creates an opportunity to balance the cells. It also means that the phone is not drawing from the battery and then charging and heating itself constantly.
The amount of heat generated by a quick 5% charge every few hours is insignificant.
82% after 2.5 years is very bad. The industrial standard for battery life is the time before reaching 80% remaining capacity, and your one is
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The worst thing for a lithium-ion batter is to hold it at full charge for a long time. Full charge is when dendrites form, which create microscopic short circuits and reduce battery life.
DIScharging is not so much a problem for the battery. Unlike the old Nickel-based batteries, discharging all the way does not create a chemical change or shorten the battery life. But it's a problem for your phone. Have you ever trie
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>> My 3.5 year old Pixel is still at 92%.
>You're either lying or you barely use your phone.
My slightly under 2-yr-old X is 96%. The 3-yr-old 7 it replaced is at 91%. The X is 50-70% every day, the 7 is 40-50%. So neither is"barely used".
But sure, call me a liar ::rolleyes::
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The phone still limits the charge rate as the battery approaches full and to balance the cells out. Also the charge controller will back off the charge rate if the battery is getting too hot. Have a look at a program like Ampere for Android to see what your battery charge rate looks like. My Galaxy S9 is currently charging at 360mA on a fast charger, as the battery is 98% full.
Fast charging isn't really all that much of a problem as it's not really all that fast when it comes to charging Li Ion batteri
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Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:4, Informative)
Charge in the case of batteries also includes voltage, as you can throw all the fucking current you want at it and it won't get stored, let alone get there in the first place, unless you keep the voltage higher than what the battery currently possesses.
Do you even understand Ohm's law? You can't have current without voltage.
Actually, charge in a battery is not about the voltage except in cases of too little to work or too much where components work so well they overheat.
A "dead" battery that's not connected to anything except a volt meter can deliver the rated voltage because of "contact voltage." That's because the measuring device has such a high internal resistance that current flow is minimal.
Using that same setup, placing a resistance in series with the volt meter will cause a severe drop in voltage reading if the battery is not capable of delivering a sufficient amount of current.
Batteries have internal resistance. When that resistance decreases from OEM design, internal current goes up and internal heat goes up. Increased heat in the battery causes increased current and things get cyclical and the battery goes into thermal runaway.
That's when things go boom.
A battery that's operating within design parameters and is low on charge is not low on voltage. A fully charged battery does not have high voltage. The internal battery resistance changes as needed to provide volt-amp requirement.
That changing resistance is a real, physical process and fatigues with time. As batteries age, they no longer have the internal flexibility to function correctly between a full and expended charge.
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A modern rechargeable battery has a voltage charge-discharge curve. Regardless of the current it delivers, the charge of a modern lithium battery, for example, is measured by the voltage.
Phone and charger circuitry measure that voltage, not a current flow.
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You clearly don't. You also can't read. I didn't say no voltage, I said regulated/i.e. constant voltage. You can have constant voltage and changes in current by varying the resistance in the circuit. That's that Ohm's Law you were pretending to understand. Off you go now ...
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This is reiterating my point, not contradicting it. DOH!
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Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:2)
Great response. You had me worried for a minute; I thought you might actually admit being wrong about something. It's nice to see that you're determined to continue being one of Slashdot resident clowns.
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Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:2)
1. We were discussing cellphones, not laptops.
2. My "insignificant" comment was made in the context of discussing a 5% drop vs a full discharge.
Maybe try to understand the comment instead of just being a condescending bastard.
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My wife on the other hand had to replace her S7 after 2 years because it couldn't go a full day without nee
Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:3)
Yes, usage makes a big difference. This is why electric car batteries can last for 10 years easy; because most days you're going to drive a short distance resulting in maybe 10-15% battery level drop, and then top it off at the end of the day. If, instead, you used 90% of your battery every single day, you would end up having to replace it far sooner.
When it comes to phones, you're the exception. Your wife's usage is much more typical.
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deep discharge/charge cycles are. You can do a 5% discharge dozens of times before doing as much damage as a single 80% discharge.
You are stuck in the last millennium.
We have 2019 now, no one is using NiCd batteries anymore.
And no, for Li-ion it is no problem to deep discharge. Nor is it for lead-gel batteries.
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A deep discharge on Li-ion would mean letting the voltage drop below 2.5 V per cell. The 0% on the battery gauge of a phone is more like 3.2 V, well above the level where the cells may suffer damage. The reason is not so much that the phone manufacturer cares about the battery degradation, but that the internal resistance below that voltage is too high to reliably deliver a high current.
Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:2)
And after nearly 2 years of daily discharge/overnight charge on my iPhone X, Iâ(TM)m at 91% of capacity.
The number one battery killer is the trickle charge when full. Absolutely killed my Lenovo laptop battery after two years (continually on AC). Got a new one and set it to stop charging at 100%, and it lasted 5+ years.
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Perhaps, but you may have failed to noticed that the original comment was about lithium batteries, not Nickel-Zinc.
So, umm.... Yeah. I believe the term is "strawman" for what you've said.
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> I believe the term is "strawman" for what you've said.
No, that would be inventing some other sort of li-ion and complaining about it.
This is moving the goalposts.
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Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:2)
You are right. Just yesterday had one battery that died in my +10 year old Nokia N900.
When I checked it, the polymer expansion had only occurred near the PCB where the mcu shield is.
I'm gonna try to switch it on some other way and check with an IR-camera to see the thermal profile.
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Re: There's an app for that.... (Score:3)
That's not how charges work. Chargers output either constant current or constant voltage, depending on how discharged the battery is. They start out in constant current, and the batteries charge the voltage rises. At a certain point the voltage will high enough that it kicks into constant voltage mode. The charger then continues at that voltage, called the float voltage until the current drops below a certain cutoff. Then the voltage is drops to the float voltage and stays there indefinitely. This is how al
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Seriously, I do this on my Android phone. It just depends on whether the maker lets you.
I use AccuBattery on my non-rooted, vanilla Android phone to trigger an audible alert whenever my phone hits 80% charge, so I can (usually) disconnect it. It's a Nexus 6P, still on its initial battery and still lasting the full day with light use.
Get an iPhone with iOS 13 (Score:3)
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This has been available for years on Sony smartphones (“Battery care”).
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The damage is not caused by how long it stays on 100%. It is caused by how quickly the battery charges in that range. Ideally the phone should only fast charge up to 80%, then trickle charge for the rest of the night. Any device with a lithium battery should have a charging controller that avoids fast charging in the 80-100% range.
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That's pretty much how it works.
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Not true charging when at 100% for extended periods causes damage.
My Sony XZ1 compact has had this for the last couple of years under the name battery care. Basically it works out when it needs to be at 100% and targets a time just before that. My guess is it uses things like the alarms and calendar to target the correct time. Only works for overnight charging of course.
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I'm not giving Apple anymore money. Dude, I use custom ROMs that should tell you a thing or two about what I think about walled and locked down ecosystems.
I don't have that much time (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not giving Apple anymore money. Dude, I use custom ROMs that should tell you a thing or two about what I think about walled and locked down ecosystems.
It tells me you have a lot more time on your hands than I do to care about such things. Not judging but that sounds like a lot of work and time invested.
I'm not wasting time (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a bit early, but if you charge an iPhone with iOS 13, it will figure out at what time in the morning you usually unplug your phone and start using it, and over night it charges only to 80%, and then charges the rest just before you get up.
That would be annoying and probably not work very well. I don't get up at exactly the same time each day, nor do most people I know. Sure I usually get up around the same time frequently but there can be several hours of variation and it isn't always predictable. It would be frustrating to wake up early one day and find your phone not fully charged for the day especially if I'm traveling that day. I've never found these features that try to predict my schedule to be very useful or work very well. (No I
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For rooted android phones (Score:4, Informative)
If you have Magisk Manager, you can install a module called Advanced Charging Controller (ACC) which lets you set charging thresholds as discussed in the summary. When your phone is charging, it will detect the current charge level and stop the charging when it reaches your desired threshold, and also has back off features so for (example) out of every 60 seconds it'll only charge for 45 seconds, to stop the battery from heating up too quickly.
ACC is a terminal application driven by config files. There's a 3rd party GUI app for it called ACCA that lets you easily make multiple config profiles, give them names and lets you edit them in a GUI interface, available here: https://github.com/MatteCarra/... [github.com]
Looks like ACCA is going to be released on google play store soon, according to the release notes at the link above.
Sounds like an Arduino + daemon job to me (Score:2)
Small Arduino boards like the M5Stack can easily communicate over bluetooth and cut off you power with a simple relay.
All you need to write is a small daemon that tells the Arduino board when to turn on/off the relay.
A few hours of tinkering should be enough to get this up and running.
But having worked on a MacBook daily for the last 5 years, I haven't noticed much about this whole 20%-80% mess. .
Just plugging it in, charge it up to 100%, draining it to 4~5%
No noticable issues so far, so I wonder if it's a
Long term storage (Score:2)
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You've hit a different mechanism. There's damage from over charging, damage from undercharging, and damage from storage outside of ideal conditions (ideal for long term storage being around 40% charge).
Non technical solutions (Score:3, Informative)
My Dell XPS laptop provides bios options - you can tell it to switch off @ a level (say 80%) and not bother recharging until it drops (to e.g. 60%). Before travel switch it over to standard charge (so, not fast change) to keep it topped up during the journey when that extra capacity is actually needed. After > 3 years of daily unplugged use, I've now bumped these levels up by 5% as some battery degradation is just starting to take effect, but battery life is still very good. That degradation will accelerate, but it's still looking miles better than prior laptops at this age & level of use.
Then for other USB-charged devices, just find plugs or low-amperage adapters that don't provide fast charge ability. E.g. my phone can report either 'standard, rapid or (when using a Dell power brick directly) "turbo" charging modes. But instead I just plug it into my desktop PC & trickle charge it for half a day while I'm at the office. This way even if it goes up to 100% it's only going to be there briefly, as opposed to plugging it in overnight. I hope this phone will last 4+ years
Buy quality to begin with (say, look for things like gorilla glass so screens don't be painful to use with age) then save money too by not needing so many regular upgrades, and reduce electronic waste. In terms of battery, this might mean looking for models with larger capacity to help with ensuring it lasts a good lifetime (not only just charge time) via reduced frequency & depth of charging cycles.
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That's also why your battery has only lasted 3 years. A standard charged Lithium battery does at least 5 years without degradation. My iPhone is 7 years old and just now is degradation having an issue, it will still last me 8-10h for relatively standard use whereas before I could have it go a night without charging.
Keep at 100% (Score:1)
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Didn't we read something earlier this year about Apple doing this 20~80% range themselves in both iOS and macOS?
So when your device shows you 100%, it's actually 80%.
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Apple fast charges to 80%, then fills slower. They do go beyond 80% but don't go below 10%, at 10% it says 0% and shuts down the OS.
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Give us some links on that Apple fake 0% if you can... trouble finding it myself.
Lithium batteries in general, and Apple specifics - I did find this though, which is pretty interesting from 2017:
https://www.howtogeek.com/1696... [howtogeek.com]
Somebody was saying from 80 to 20 is bad... but I don't think that is right. According to that website, just going below 20 is bad. They also say keeping a laptop at 100% is fine too, although Apple recommends sometimes letting it charge down a little.
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Didn't we read something earlier this year about Apple doing this 20~80% range themselves in both iOS and macOS? So when your device shows you 100%, it's actually 80%.
Not quite. It's at about 95%, and the remaining 5% take a long time. So this is for people who are a bit anal and can't leave home until their phone is fully charged - they can leave a lot earlier and don't have to wait a long time for the last five percent. For someone who charges overnight, it makes no difference, but you will notice that your phone stays on 100% for quite a while.
For tests how long the phone lasts, Apple charges until the display reaches 100%. Not until the battery cannot be charged a
How about 100% discharge with minimal degradation? (Score:2)
See the new paper here [ecsdl.org].
In the long-term cycle testing, preference is given to studies over 100% DOD which is between 3.0 and 4.3 V for the cells considered here. However, some testing results are given for lower DOD ranges such as 3.0 to 4.2 V and 3.0 to 4.1 V to show the advantages that charging to a lower voltage can bring in both cycling and storage.
After 5,000 full cycles the cells still have ~95% capacity...
There's a thread here [slashdot.org] on /. but I don't think people RTFA. ;)
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Since Li-ion batteries slowly lose charge even w
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Man, I wish my house would freakin' brick itself. Damn contractors.
80% is a myth. (Score:2)
I've got a 10 year old Nokia with an LI battery and its always been charged to 100%.. Today it still takes at a rough guess 60-70% of its original capacity going by talk and standby time.
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Your anecdotal "guess" that your phone is at 60-70% after 10 years doesn't make this a myth.
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Ok, not so much a guess: (Current talk time / initial talk time) * 100.
So yes, it is a myth. I've got plenty of other newer LI battery devices that also get charged to 100% and I've seen little to no degredation on them either.
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Here's the thing... In reality, there are actually many factors. We tend to all think that all LI batteries are the same, but there are actually a lot of different battery chemistry options that have different advantages and disadvantages.. One of the main options is a reduced initial capacity of the battery but with a better long-term capacity to the battery. This is independent of your charging habits. All types get increases in longevity by sticking to the 80/20 rule (assuming the manufacturer didn't
Re: 80% is a myth. (Score:2)
It's a Nokia so it's plausible depending on usage. IIRC my old Nokia could go a week without charging, meaning you would go through maybe 60 charge cycles per year. With a modern smartphone many people are doing 400+ charge cycles per year.
It's real (Score:2)
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Charge circuitry and intelligence is in the battery cells itself.
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Cool you have a device that violates physics!
Or maybe your 10 year old device never actually charged to 100%. I mean did you pull the battery out and manually measure it every time or did you just believe what a pre-engineered piece of equipment told you about what it did to the battery when you plugged it in?
HP omen laptop, do it in bios. (Score:2)
on some laptops you can do it in bios.. I've put it to 80%.
you'll need to google separately how to even get into the bios though on some laptops, including this one. it works just fine. do I think it matters that much? probably not.
Sony Xperia (Score:2)
The Sony Xperia range of phones do this, to an extent. The phone will learn your charging habits, and knows what time your alarm is set for, so when you plug it in at night it will charge to around 90% and hold the charge there, and will bring the charge up to 100% shortly before you would be unplugging it.
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The Sony Xperia range of phones do this, to an extent. The phone will learn your charging habits, and knows what time your alarm is set for, so when you plug it in at night it will charge to around 90% and hold the charge there, and will bring the charge up to 100% shortly before you would be unplugging it.
When I posted the same thing for iOS 13, I was told in no uncertain terms that this is badly thought out and doesn't work. So don't mention it anymore until Samsung copies your phone and my phone.
Just don't. (Score:2)
Current batteries in laptops/phones are garbage compared to something you can make yourself. Make a powerpack with LTO batteries, several discharging ports and charge it however/whenever/wherever you want.
Worried about i getting cold? Don't. Catching on fire? Can't happen. Cut in half? Still no fire.
Unsurprisingly, TLP (Score:2)
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The part that got stripped out of my submission was where I pointed out that charge limits and most other features are Thinkpad only.
It's physical damage to the cells (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's physical damage to the cells (Score:4, Insightful)
There are always a few idiots that claim that well established facts are not real. See also flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, etc.
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I think both sides are right in their own way.
- It is true that overcharging a Li-ion battery, or even maintaining it to 100% is to be avoided.
- It is also true that charging a device to 100% regularly is mostly harmless.
The reasons is that your device lies to you. The 100% you see is not really 100%, it is probably somewhere between 90% and 100%, or even less depending on the model. One reason is that your device may not use the full capacity of its battery in order to make it last longer. Another is that
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We lead users around by the nose all the time, I'm confident that something that happens worldwide, on most every consumer electronic, for years and years, is pretty universal about throttling the battery (100 and 0). I'll worry if I have printed-straight-from-chinese-factory-R&D fringe stuff, thinking DIY/engineer-experiment things or someone cutting amazing corners on an internal project. Naked cells, which might cost MORE than the prefab battery from the same supplier.
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Very interesting. Here is an older article just talking about these dendrites in general.
https://www.electronicproducts... [electronicproducts.com]
AccuBattery on Android (Score:2)
Conventional wisdom is out of date (Score:2)
This is a function of intelligent battery management that devices *already do*. 100% charge on your iPhone does not mean that lithium cell is at capacity and incapable of holding more charge.
At best manufacturers already manage this in the background for you. At worst you're arbitrarily picking something that you have no way to implement (80% of what the manufacturer means what in terms of the lithium battery, what's better than 80%? 70%!)
Live your life and let the smart electronics take care of the problem
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I'm wondering what the gain is here with this micromanagement. Is it meant to make sure a battery remains "good" for beyond 5 years or longer?
IMHO whatever improvement is achieved seems nullified by the device itself slowing creeping towards obsolescence.
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I love it when batteries last longer, but I really hate having to babysit them. My kids use all our old devices. An iPad 2 from around 2012 or 2013 is still working well battery-wise now in the fall of 2019. We have two iphone 4 models, a couple of iphone 5 models. The iphone 4 phones (I want to type iPhone 4s, but that sounds like a "Four Ess" not plural iphone 4), are neglected and drop to 0 percent while powered down doing nothing on the shelf for months so they are starting to suck at holding a charge w
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I would love to scream conspiracy, that vendors give us timebomb sealed batteries that will expire when they want us to buy new devices, but generally my thinking is they can't. The batteries have to be more or less optimally managed in software given the abuse ordinary users will subject them to in the device's "expected" lifetime.
If they tried to make the batteries too much a part of planned obsolescence the vendors would be getting creamed by the masses whose batteries crap out in mere months after purc
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Nearly. Lithium definitely needs weird charging mojo. The difference is that for the most part people don't actually charge battery cells like we did previously, but rather we charge them indirectly through our devices which already contain the needed smarts. Like my phone in the car will charge quite quickly to around 70% then charge slowly. If the sun is shining it charges even slower or stops altogether. 100% is not actually 100%.
The device itself tries to preserve the longevity of its battery.
I don't know, and I don't care (Score:3)
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As far as I can tell, there's a lot of mythology
No mythology, just chemistry and physics that apply to most current consumer devices consistently. The only problem is that the chemistry and physics apply to the battery cells themselves. You aren't in control of the cells, there's a smart charger in between you and them, and you've got no idea what it's doing under the hood.
Good devices come with that function (Score:2)
For bad ones, you are pretty much screwed.
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Then people would complain about too low run-time per charge. This is probably mostly a problem of broken user expectations and marketing, not a technology issue.
Just ignore it (Score:3)
Charge it long enough to 100% and sooner or later that 100% will mean 80% in reality.
Then buy a new one for 25 bucks.
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$25? You're paying too much. the generic 15 bucks (from the same companies that make the OEM) are fine and I've had no problems. Cheap batteries and cheap chargers, saves a bundle
Is it really worth the effort? (Score:2)
So your battery will last for 2500 days vs 2200 days. While you are managing every battery you own, with perhaps hundreds of dollars of equipment or software that may or may not work. Where even for more expensive batteries you may be better off getting a new device, or buying a replacement battery. Because that battery that is 2200 days old while may still hold a charge, will be a far cry from its peak usage years ago.
The difference between being cheap and frugal is that being cheap you spend more time a
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I hear your point, but not sure I agree. I've got a non-techie example. The guy who cooks his own meal, that takes an extra 10+ hours a week, saves money over the guy eating out/heating up instant food all the time. In the short run. And in the long run, he has less health problems and saves money again. Sometimes all you do is save time and screw yourself later.
Techie example... I really really hate babysitting battery charging. Why not use an app or program that helps you manage your batteries. Or buy the
WEMO smart outlet (Score:2)
An apparently unorthodox solution, I just plug my devices into a WEMO smart outlet already set for 20 minutes of power.
Let it run during breakfast, set for the day.
I design batteries for a living (Score:2, Informative)
I design rechargeable lithium ion battery packs for a living.
As long as you are buying a proper UL-listed rechargeable battery, there is absolutely nothing you need to do, because it is done for you.
Re: I design batteries for a living (Score:2)
I wish I could mod you up.
The idea that any of us can do better than experts in the field who worry about nothing else all day, every day is absurd. The battery management systems they design do all the work for us.
Thereâ(TM)s a similar paradigm in computing: only idiots implement their own encryption library.
It doesnâ(TM)t stop people from thinking they know better, or selling a piece of software that breaks either rule.
Magisk mcs (Score:2)
On Android root with Magisk, use the Magic Charging Switch (mcs) module. It lets you configure upper and lower bounds for charging.
Not necessary! (Score:5, Insightful)
Phones and laptops already have a pretty sophisticated BMS. By trying to mess with charge rates and capacity management on your own you at best are going to throw the BMS for a loop and at worse you might reduce the life of your batteries: If you never charge them fully, for instance, you may not ever get a multi-cell pack to be balanced (since BMS typically doesn't balance until the end of the cycle), and over its life you may over stress a single cell.
Most consumer devices only have a few bucks worth of battery in them anyway. It's not efficient to overthink it. If you are a nerd capable of worrying about battery lifetime and have the diligence to micromanage that crap for years and years to save like $10 then you certainly have the capability to swap and recycle your own battery when it's time.
Cheap Timer (Score:2)
Check w/ your manufacturer! (Score:2)
Some Manufacturers open this setting in the bios. I have a Dell I inherited that allows me to do just that, it's got no discrete graphics, so my 7yo son uses it, but I did just this
Also, I Fly R/C planes, and can tell you (Score:2)
From experience that the #1 thing that kills my lipos is storing them charged. I'm HORRIBLE at storing depleted batteries. I've paid easily 3x more than needed on lipos because I have a bad tendancy to store them fully charged in the fall, and they are trashed come summer.
The second thing that kills my batteries fast is dumping the charge while doing multiple high speed passes w/in a few minutes on a battery not rated for that kind of current draw. This however has killed less batteries than above. TAKE
LiitoKala Engineer Lii-500 (Score:2)
I found this charger after I saw someone using a dozen or so of them to charge 18650 batteries in a Youtube video (he made an electric VW bus.)
It has four slots which charge independently, and will take anything from AAA to 28650, maybe larger. It auto-detects the battery size and type, then gives you three options:
1. plain charge
2. fast test (simple safe discharge test) or
3. normal test, where it fully charges it, fully discharges it to a safe level, then fully charges it again. If you do this you'