Getting the Most out of Batteries: The Truth VS What You’ve Been Told

hi i believe in never leaving batteries charging over night, big no no. laptop batteries can go as far as 10% then they have to be recharger but power banks i think is 20%

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Excelente información! han aclarados muchos puntos que son dudas entre los consumidores.

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In MY experience, with Lithium laptop batteries, if you leave the battery in and run off of mains - pluffing it into the wall, so kind of using the battery as a backup power supply if the mains power drops, that the battery does indeed degrade rather quickly. I have had them last 4 hrs when used alone, then run it for a few month on mains, then when I go back into the office and run off of battery, it only lasts 1.5 hours (same basic procesor load in both scenarios).

I love Anker, I am a total fan, and their use of 18650’s with regulators means that their products last - and they do, I have one almost 3 years old and all the ports work just fine, and it will still recharge my cell phone 3x easily. Now if trhey ever start to make laptop batteries with internal charging protection… :slight_smile:

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All f this has been so helpful. I really need to start letting my battery rest every so often because im guilty of charging all the way to 100% in one sitting.

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Great info, thanks!

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I keep my phone on power saving mode when sitting idle, I suspect this helps save a few cycles a week and at three years old it’s still going strong.

I’d also suggest turning off an app’s background data, notifications and other features unless you get value out of them.

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Thank you for this, Anker. Everyone I tell this to always doubts me, yet I have been practicing this and have VERIFIABLE results comparing my total capacity drained from 5 months of charging with crappy cables + not caring or knowing about the 40-80% Goldilocks zone vs using only Anker stuff and rarely going out of that 40-80% (okay, sometimes 90%) zone.

Capacity drained 7% of the 2750mAh battery in 6s+ in the 5 months span, and 11 months later, of even heavier use than it got in the 5 month period, the total capacity has went down 4%.

Verified with the Battery Life app in the App Store which gets info straight from the sensors in the battery itself (which Apple unfortunately reduced all apps’ function to see the capacity and cycles with iOS 10, so you’d have to jailbreak to get that info now :/)

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Thanks for the info. That clears up a lot of the myths I’ve heard over the years and explains why my wife’s iPhone 5’s battery life is getting worse

wow does that don’t over charge your battery rule also apply to laptop?
(I already knew that over charging your battery on your phone was bad)

Great info, I’ve heard this at other places as well. Do you know if this applies to Li-Polymer batteries as well?

I thought all of those were true…

You should make more posts like this one. I will come the site and read avery new learning post you write

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Thanks for your good suggestion, we will continually bring some good ideas in the community, please keep an eye out for it!:grin:

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New people read this.

This should be pinned with the rules or somewhere similar.

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Very good information for users. A few corrections though. The magic range is 20-80% (don’t trust everything battery university or Wikipedia says; ask real battery scientists).
If Li-ons are operated between 20-80% their life cycle increases to almost 30-40000 cycles. This is mostly due to cracking that happens to anode (Graphite) due to intercalation of Li. Cracking increases internal resistance and then the battery doesn’t utilize its full capacity. By reducing it to 80%, this anode degradation is greatly reduced.
There are new battery chemistry that can improve cycle life from 300-500 to almost 2000 cycles.

To add to this, Charging the brand new device to 100% is not a myth in scientific sense. But now a days it becomes useless because the li-ion battery in the device has already been charged to 100% once.
This first full charge is extremely important.
Li-ion electrolyte is not stable in the voltage at which negative electrode is operating. Due to this there is a degradation of electrolyte. The good thing is that when the electrolyte degrades it forms an insulating polymer layer called SEI layer (Solid Electrolyte Interphase). This layer doesn’t allow any more of electrolyte to come in contact with negative electrode and thus stops any further electrolyte degradation. At the same time this layer doesn’t stop Li+ ions to pass through (which is great). This SEI layer mostly forms during first 100% full charge so that’s why first charge is most important to make a healthy li-ion battery.

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Thanks for bringing this thread to live. You are correct, this should be pinned permanently. @AnkerTechnical can you do this?
@kumar.sachin Thanks for adding your knowledge, this will help for sure.

I should change my bad habits of charging my phone as soon as it goes below 80% :joy: was worried that I may need it for extra long time without finding a charger. Need to learn better ways to live without phone and charging :grin:

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