Live data from Hacker News

Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

electronics.stackexchange.com

321–330 of 362 posts

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#321
For people who care about this, I would recommend float charging at 40%, slow charge to 60% before use, then slow discharge to 40%, preferably all done at 10 degrees C. And, for safety reasons, you should ideally have supervised charging in a fireproof bunker. Empty fireplaces and concrete basement floors can work in a pinch.

If you don't care, just use your device normally and buy a new one when the old one's cycle life starts to suffer.

If you want to be somewhere in the middle, try to plug it in reasonably soon after it dies, or ideally before it dies. Keep an eye on your devices on the first charge after you buy them, and on the first charge after a drop or impact, watching for smoke, burning plastic smell and swelling. Don't attempt to charge a swelled battery, and dispose of lithium ion batteries properly. Disclaimer: All the above advice is given without warranty, do your own research and don't rely on this advice for your safety.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being buried away in technical debugging tools is 'silent' for 99.9% of users.

A common task that repair shops do to "fix a slow PC" is clean dust from the fans and heatsinks to reduce throttling. Users don't know or understand that this is happening, they just know their system is slow.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#323
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top charge in a lithium battery is very arbitrary. Most batteries can tolerate going higher than the specified 4.2v, up to 4.3 or 4.35v - but the cycle life degradation is not worth the extra capacity.

This is exactly the answer. Especially with Li-Ion cells everything is a compromise. You can extend the life of the cell by a fair amount, but then it won't last as long before you have to re-charge. Similarly, if you charge it quicker, then it reduces the lifetime of the cell. I honestly don't understand how people worry about their batteries in their devices so much. I give pretty much zero care into how I treat th…

I've babied my iphone x battery (battery case ftw) and it's at "86%" after five years.

Even with all the nice features apple offers for battery management they still design their phones to have undersized batteries and encourage usage patterns that degrade the battery in ~2 years, when they could just slightly increase the thickness of the phone and increase the lifespan to ~5 years.

Very conservative depths of discharge and charging termination voltages can extend life spans into the 10,000 cycle ranges which is effectively forever for a device with a finite lifespan. And it wouldn't increase the weight of the phone too much: doubling battery capacity isn't doubling the size of the phone or even the battery itself. Just the active material in the battery.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#324
post #3

I've given up trying. If a device is willing to lie to me and only charge to 80% while saying it's charged, great, but all of this "try to stay in a range" logic flies in the face of reality. Every device I use besides my cell phone, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo 3DS has atrocious power drain when not in use. OS does not matter. Windows laptop, Linux laptop, ChromeOS laptop, Android Tablet, Amazon Tablet, you name it…

I don't understand why devices can't switch to external power when plugged in. It's like they simultaneously charge and discharge the battery instead of bypassing it.

Depends on the device. Some do. Some actually can't, because they are capable of drawing more peak power than their wall chargers provide.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#325
post #3

I've given up trying. If a device is willing to lie to me and only charge to 80% while saying it's charged, great, but all of this "try to stay in a range" logic flies in the face of reality. Every device I use besides my cell phone, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo 3DS has atrocious power drain when not in use. OS does not matter. Windows laptop, Linux laptop, ChromeOS laptop, Android Tablet, Amazon Tablet, you name it…

If you shut down your Windows laptop or Linux laptop completely, or remove the battery, the battery will not drain. I've accepted that manufacturers cannot or do not care or will not give me instant wake without atrocious power drain during sleep. Modern solid-state storage boots up really fast, and my browser, IDE, text editor and other tools are pretty good at restoring my working state after boot.

Windows laptops are embarrassing. I don't want to only use Apple, but why can't anyone else make a laptop that doesn't require a Human BMS? When I got my first Macbook for work, I was amazed to open it after a week of traveling to find it booted instantly at full charge. Meanwhile my old HP would play slack notifications in my backpack as it's going through the x-ray machine at the airport lmao

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#326
post #116

I wish they would label it so that it shows 100% charge when it's actually charged 80%, and then give an option to 'overcharge' a configurable amount till 125% (the current 100%). That way it will make people aware that they are reducing the battery life by overcharging, and be picky when they overcharge. But this won't happen because reduced battery life is a big direct and indirect(by reducing performance like Appl…

> by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load which would otherwise result in crashes that would have made the device borderline unusable below some charge percentage. Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle, but the feature itself was amazing as it let already old phon…

Except they only HAD to do that because the battery simply did not have the capability to continue providing enough voltage and/or current by the time it got to about 20% degraded, which for many people could happen in just a few years. This only happened because they were putting stupidly small batteries in their phones to shave another millimeter off of the size that nobody cared about.

Either Apple did the proper QA of the battery to understand how it would behave as it got to end of life and knowingly put a battery into a $800 phone that wouldn't be functional before the phone would run out of software updates, or they FAILED to do proper longevity testing on the battery of a $800 phone.

It wasn't planned obsolescence when they added that code to keep the older phones working. It WAS planned obsolescence when they put a pitiful and underspecced battery into their $800 phone.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#327

This 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…

It's highly dependent on the actual chemistry of the battery used.

If you can find the spec sheet from the battery manufacturer, it should tell how discharge/charge voltages affect lifespan.

Broadly, for lithium you can check out these charts: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dod+cycle+life+lithium+...

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#328
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a goalpost shift. It's THE argument. I'm not sure what arguments are there for alternative narratives.

> It's THE argument From people I've talked to, it seems like the VAST majority of people are under the impression that Apple does this as a planned obsolescence practice. In fact, this thread is the first one I've come across where most people seem to get the point of the feature

The planned obsolescence was when Apple put a small battery in a flagship phone that could no longer produce the required voltage and/or current to keep up with hardware demands despite being only moderately used. Apple is the same company that brags about forever years of software updates, but plenty of people were running into this issue after only a few years, including my own mother who's iPhone couldn't even make a single phone call despite the battery reporting 90% state of charge.

Notably, this will no longer be an issue on modern iPhones because they have much more reasonable batteries.

Apple underspecced the batteries in iPhones and then hid the software kludge they made to hide that fact. That's why the reaction is warranted.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N=1 doesn't really tell you much of anything about anything.

Well, my wife's work supplied EliteBook's battery has been replaced today due to excessive swallowing, and it's definitely younger than my 2014 MacBook Pro.

An entire production run of Macbook Pro 2015s had to be recalled and replaced because the batteries were inflating and bursting into flames.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#330
post #299

I use a Chargie (chargie.org) hardware device to limit charge on my devices to 80%, and the batteries last nearly forever. Currently typing this on a 4 year old iPhone with like new battery function. I highly recommend these, I’ve been using them since they were first sold. I have no affiliation, but am a very satisfied customer. For my Macbooks I use an app called Al Dente. I still have have 2016 MacBook with like n…

Is that really necessary? Don't basically all modern phones, laptops, tablets, etc all have battery protection software built-in?

Not at all… basically no devices let you limit charge to any desired preset level. Apple devices have a system that slows down/pauses the charging so the device spends less time fully charged, but still charges to 100% eventually.

With careful management, you can as much as triple or quadruple the usable lifespan of a regular lithium battery consumer device.

Post reply on HN