Lithium batteries changed our life experiences in many beneficial ways. Their greater energy by weight and volume, improves personal devices and enables new ones of which our latest smartphones stand out. However, all great inventions come at a cost, and lithium metal’s baggage is its chemical instability. This raises an important question. Should we be charging smartphone batteries overnight?
Why Worry About Charging Smartphone Batteries Overnight?
When we charge our smartphones during daytime, we can keep our eyes on them. Have they reached their optimum charge level, are their phone cases and charging cables temperatures that we expect? But when we retire for the night we close our eyes and hope everything is in order while we sleep.
No smartphone battery is an island unaffected by its environment. News 24 confirms how both manufacturing aging, and chemical aging affect how long a battery’s useful life lasts. Chemical aging, in turn is affected by ambient temperature, charging and discharging patterns, and how users behave.
Those factors eventually reduce how much charge a lithium phone battery can retain, and therefore, how often we must recharge it. But these issues also whittle away its useful life, as well as its overall performance.
Research funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 Project (see link below) suggests the average smartphone battery sheds 20% of its storage energy after 850 full charge/discharge cycles. But what has this to do with charging smartphone batteries overnight?
Why We Should Not Charge a Phone Fully Overnight
We cannot monitor the charging process while we are asleep in bed. And we are unlikely to stay awake until the process is complete either. We should never allow a smartphone battery to fully charge to 100%. Because doing so repeatedly could shorten its useful life, and replacement batteries do cost a tidy sum.
The final clincher is that smartphone batteries gradually self-discharge even when just ticking over. A full phone battery could drop below 99% due to apps running in the background, if we leave a phone on charge overnight. This consumes at least one more recharging recycle, something we ought to do our best to avoid.
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