3 Top Tips to Stop Short Battery Life
| Reuben Howe
The battery of your wireless tech, from your phone to a portable TV, is really the core to the entire experience. You can have the best apps installed on a phone and best music to play on your headphones, but none of that much matters if the battery has deteriorated and only holds an hour of charge!
Learn how to look after your batteries and keep internal batteries operational longer, saving you a bit of money (and a lot of irritation) in the the long run.
Why Does Battery Life Get Shorter?
If you've ever noticed your phone, headphones, earphones or game controllers start to run out of battery faster than usual, there's a good chance the battery is deteriorating.
Batteries work through chemical reactions that allow energy to flow from one side of the battery to the other. This is an oversimplified explanation, but one that serves our purposes here.
Imagine each end of the battery is a person, and they are throwing a ball between each other.
As they pass the ball back and forth (moving energy around and generating motion, heat and all sorts) they might become tired. They take a step closer together.
This means the people are still passing the ball as far as they can, but that total distance is smaller.
In a very analogous way, that's what happens to batteries over time.
Their ingredients become worn out and unbalanced, and slowly the maximum capacity for the battery lowers.
1. Don't Fully Charge or Discharge Batteries
There are a few ways you can actively combat this loss of battery efficiency, by taking good care of how you charge the batteries.
The first method, and one many of us are guilty of, is to ensure the battery is unplugged when it reaches near-100%.
A battery being constantly provided energy when it is at capacity is like forcing the two people playing catch to throw at full speed, max distance, but constantly giving them energy drinks.
Sure, they can do it, but it's not healthy.
Most of us leave our phone's plugged in overnight, for example, and this can speed up the degradation process in this way.
Ideally, charge your phone to around 90% before bed, and if you need to top it up during the day a little, that's okay.
The same logic applies in reverse for draining the battery to 0%. It's better to begin charging when batteries reach 10 - 20%, rather than to let them run completely dry.
2. Avoid Fast-Charging All the Time
Fast-charge cables and ports were all the rage for a while, charging your phone and other devices from 0 to 100 in as low as 20 minutes.
While that sounds great, the amount of work the battery has to put in is high.
A change in energy is when the battery is working hardest, so making a battery charge in 20 minutes is a lot of work in a short amount of time.
Using fast-charge on occasion is fine, but routine bursts every day will increase degradation speed and make your phone lose battery life.
If you notice your phone doesn't hold charge, it might be because you relied on fast-charge every day.
3. Avoid Fast Discharging (High Power Devices)
I mentioned before that a change in energy is when a battery works hardest.
Thing is, that applies to discharge as well as recharge.
What this means is that using a large amount of charge in a short time can damage the battery over time.
Most of the time, your devices self-regulate and will follow rules which stop battery draining too fast. However, if you are using location services, have the screen on max brightness and are running a game or watching a video (especially if the video is being streamed online so the internet is in use, too!) then battery can discharge far faster than normal.
This can, over time, stop your battery holding charge for as long as it should.
This is also why using power packs for high-power electricals is discouraged, as the power pack discharging entirely in a matter of minutes to charge a large appliance is not healthy for the power pack.
Take Care of Your Batteries
We rely on wireless tech almost every single day, and the poor things try as hard as they can to stay ready-to-use at all times. The least we can do is look after our batteries with good charging and discharging behaviour to ensure we can use our devices longer.
The next time you get a new phone or pair of headphones or power pack, make sure you are enacting these three methods right from the start to minimise the risk of you battery no longer holding charge!
The effect will still take place over time, eventually, but this way you can be sure to get the maximum possible life out of your tech without hurrying along its demise.
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