What really is the best way to use your battery? (Mainly Mobile and Laptops)

[hotmailbelike]

Hey everyone,

It's 2021 I am still very confused about the best way to use your battery for a prolonged life.

I have done many Google searches, some say keep it 90%, some say use however, some say sometimes fully discharge, and so many more!

 

So, I am posting my question here now.

What really is the best way to use your Mobile and Laptop battery for a prolonged life?

 

Thanks!

[WereCatf]

3 minutes ago, hotmailbelike said:

I have done many Google searches, some say keep it 90%, some say use however, some say sometimes fully discharge, and so many more!

Modern batteries do not like to be fully discharged, you are reducing their lifetime by doing that; that advice was valid for NiCd, but no one uses those anymore. Li-ion also likes to be charged often.

 

Technically, for prolonged lifetime, you'd only discharge it to ~20% and charge it up to ~80%, but phones and laptops may already have limits in place -- you'd have to dig into the specifics on your device, if you really wanted to make sure on whether there are such or not.

 

Personally, I try to charge whenever I hit 50% and charge up to 80%, but then again, I am not hooked up to my phone 24/7, so the 30% (ie. 50% -> 80%) charge I am getting typically lasts me a whole day just fine.

[paddy-stone]

AFAIK the latest line of batteries for mobiles at least, suggest only letting it go down to around 20% before charging again. But I think that it doesn't matter so much now, say you used 50% battery one day, charged it up again that night, and did the same the next day, equaling 100% in 2 days, which would be one charge cycle.

And depending on the battery tech, they say that most batteries should still have max capacity up until so many charge cycles IIRC. I think you should be good for using one charge cycle a day for at least 3 years before the capacity significantly decreases. 

 

With my old poco f1, it was charged most days for a full cycle, and is still going very well after around 800 days or so... my brother has that phone now and lets it get much lower before recharging it, I've tried explaining to him, but he doesn't get it... so we'll see how it goes.

[WereCatf]

2 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

But I think that it doesn't matter so much now, say you used 50% battery one day, charged it up again that night, and did the same the next day, equaling 100% in 2 days, which would be one charge cycle.

Batteries don't count charge-cycles. 20% charge is 20% charge, regardless of whether you then charge it up to 100% or not. Charge-cycles are for us humans and, quite frankly, it's kind of a useless measure except in theoretical circumstances.

4 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

I think you should be good for using one charge cycle a day for at least 3 years before the capacity significantly decreases.

While I do not agree with this "charge cycle" - stupidity, I agree with the sentiment: there is typically not that much of a reason to worry about their battery-capacity, especially on phones where it's handled much better than in a laptop.

 

Personally, there are only two reasons why I bother looking at the charge-status of my phone: I have practically zero budget, so I have to make my phone last, and because it just simply happens to fit in my daily rhythm nicely anyways, ie. when I wake up, it's typically at 40%-60% charge and, since I always plop my ass in front of my desktop in the morning anyways, it's easy to charge the phone as well while at it. If it didn't fit as nicely into my daily rhythm, I would just charge it up to full whenever.

[paddy-stone]

5 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Batteries don't count charge-cycles. 20% charge is 20% charge, regardless of whether you then charge it up to 100% or not. Charge-cycles are for us humans and, quite frankly, it's kind of a useless measure except in theoretical circumstances.

While I do not agree with this "charge cycle" - stupidity, I agree with the sentiment: there is typically not that much of a reason to worry about their battery-capacity, especially on phones where it's handled much better than in a laptop.

 

Personally, there are only two reasons why I bother looking at the charge-status of my phone: I have practically zero budget, so I have to make my phone last, and because it just simply happens to fit in my daily rhythm nicely anyways, ie. when I wake up, it's typically at 40%-60% charge and, since I always plop my ass in front of my desktop in the morning anyways, it's easy to charge the phone as well while at it. If it didn't fit as nicely into my daily rhythm, I would just charge it up to full whenever.

 

I'm just going by what I have heard/read just about everywhere, where they use the term "charge-cycles" for explaining longevity, for example they say the iphone has approximately 400-500 full charge cycles.

[NineEyeRon]

Use your battery doing the stuff you love, battery life is too short to do things that don’t make you happy.

[Purgent]

20 hours ago, hotmailbelike said:

Hey everyone,

It's 2021 I am still very confused about the best way to use your battery for a prolonged life.

I have done many Google searches, some say keep it 90%, some say use however, some say sometimes fully discharge, and so many more!

 

So, I am posting my question here now.

What really is the best way to use your Mobile and Laptop battery for a prolonged life?

 

Thanks!

The amount of time spent worrying about it and modifying (either conscious or sub-consciously) your habits to extend battery life a trivial amount is worth far more than just living your life, worrying about more important things, and just replacing the damn battery some day down the road.