Note: changing the chemistry is likely an option.
Lead-Acids prefer to sit at 100% or even slightly overcharged.
Figuring out the 80% point of li-ion is difficult due to the flat discharge curve.
Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
311–320 of 362 posts
Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many products have components that downgrade under specific situations and they never explicitly tell the customer - and most customers don’t ask because it’s “complicated tech” they don’t want to know about it.
A lot of laptops do this when running on battery power. Do they pop up notices telling users they are running in reduced power mode?
I recall mine sometimes doing so if I unplug while it is on. Never occurs while it is booted on battery.
Laptops and phones also notoriously slow down to manage heat, and that is also never told to the user.
Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Samsung and others spread a bunch of FUD that Apple was crippling their phones to force people to upgrade, and Reddit and HN apple-haters ate it up. Still to this day people on HN repeat it like it's fact, and when you correct them, shift the goalposts to "well they didn't TELL people."
This is not a goalpost shift. It's THE argument. I'm not sure what arguments are there for alternative narratives.
No, Apple's throttling to prevent crashes is no more "planned obsolescence" than how Samsung (or any) laptops thermal throttle when the heat sinks get dirty.
Designing a product to fail gracefully is good engineering practice.
Apple made the right decision to make the phone go slower instead of crashing. Somewhere out there, there's someone making a 911 call on an iPhone with an old battery.
Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Samsung and others spread a bunch of FUD that Apple was crippling their phones to force people to upgrade, and Reddit and HN apple-haters ate it up. Still to this day people on HN repeat it like it's fact, and when you correct them, shift the goalposts to "well they didn't TELL people."
My iPhone was affected by this. Let me tell you my experience, without "Samsung FUD": - The phone became slow, laggy animations, etc. - I had no idea what was causing the problem. - There was no way to return to an older iOS version or a way to disable the new behaviour. - I went to an Apple store and was told that I probably should get a new phone. I'm sure they had some good intentions, but in practice they degrade…
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Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
iPhones with degraded batteries have the tendency to shutdown on peak loads. Default is fine but only after a big fat pop-up with the option to deactivate it.
As if the typical user (not anyone that browsers hn) actually reads the _big fat popup_ and would just click through anyways. With no care or worry about what that pop up said or the implications. Apple “You clicked a pop up that said you accepted random shutdowns and reboots due to a degraded battery instead of allowing us to degrade performance to enable a stable experience with a degraded battery.” How would you e…
Because one looks like a hardware defect and the other like a problem of old age and is "easier" to accept for most people.
Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say you read that "what's new" pop-up and still update your phone because you expect it to work like before, but it doesn't because you're one of the lucky ones that had the clock speeds cut in half. What do you do now? Your phone is laggy and there's no setting to disable the feature or a way to revert to an old iOS version. You go to the store and they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but…
> they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone! You keep repeating this, but battery replacements were a thing before this whole debacle. I got them a few times, I think they were like $79 (yes definitely more money than the sus extended batteries I'd buy off eBay for my HTC Evo). I realize society collectively forgot about them once the back stopped coming off the phone,…
To replace the battery you need to know there's a problem with the battery. But the iPhone didn't tell me the issue was the battery. It happened after a software update if I remember correctly, so I did everything from formatting it to reducing the graphics load by using the accessibility settings... nothing worked. When I went to the nearest Apple store, the guy told me that I should probably get a new one.
I don't blame him for recommending a new phone, after all apparently Apple didn't inform all their stores about the change, so they probably had no idea that the fix was a cheap battery replacement.
Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many products have components that downgrade under specific situations and they never explicitly tell the customer - and most customers don’t ask because it’s “complicated tech” they don’t want to know about it.
Clog the heatsink on just about any PC and it'll happily and silently thermal throttle itself.
That stretches the definition of silent. On MacOS you need command line utilities or third party software to observe throttling, but on Windows this information is easily viewable in the performance tab of the task manager, and Linux exposes this information in /proc.
Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
#318This seems to be good advice for single cells. But what about packs with cells wired in series and parallel? My understanding is, that packs always come with a battery management system (BMS) that will balance the cell voltages and therefore compensate for slight variations between cells that can manifest during use and charging. This seems to be necessary for both performance and longevity of the pack. Now the quest…
> do these BMSs work properly if you never or rarely charge your pack to 100%
I'm no EE, but from the instructions I was given, the answer is no, the BMS requires 100% charge to kick in and "top up" the lower cells.
The recommendation was to do that every n=few charging cycles.
Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load" It wasn't what Apple was doing that was the problem, it was the fact that they were initially quite secretive about it! People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation. Now days iOS tells if your battery no longer supports peak performance, which is the right thing to do. > "Yes, they s…
I wonder how many products have components that downgrade under specific situations and they never explicitly tell the customer - and most customers don’t ask because it’s “complicated tech” they don’t want to know about it.
Maybe this is just me but I always assumed USB cables had indefinite lifespan until I happened to read a datasheet.
Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
#320This post doesn't give any actual argument why you should charge your device only to 80%. If you use your phone for, say, four years, and charge it to 100% regularly, how much will the battery life deteriorate during those four years? I assume if the fully-charged capacity after three years is still at least 80% of the original, then regularly charging it fully was absolutely worth it. The point is that deterioration…
> This post doesn't give any actual argument why you should charge your device only to 80%. It does, it tells you the battery will degrade 5 times less compared to charging it to 100%. If that is worth it is up to you to decide. I charge my phone daily, it's usually around 40% at the end of day so charging it to 80% should only benefit me.
> It does, it tells you the battery will degrade 5 times less compared to charging it to 100%.
The original question was whether the slower degradation of the battery is worth the immediate loss of 20% battery capacity, not whether the battery degrades slower.