Lots of people just charge their phone at night, while they sleep so that they won’t have to put their phone aside during the day whilst waiting for it to fully charge. They, just plug in, lie down, and wake up with a wonderful 100 percent fresh start. Unfortunately, this is actually one of the worst ways to charge your phone, and here’s why.
You are killing your battery
If you are going to keep charging your cell phone all night, every night, you will be sucking the life right out of that poor battery.From the moment a newborn rechargeable battery enters the world, it starts degrading. According to Time, the batteries that power your favorite mobile devices only have a limited time to keep going before they start losing their charge faster.
You know this, of course, since your 2-year-old phone’s battery runs out way faster than it used to. What you might not know, though, is that the more time your phone spends charging, the faster its battery capacity will decline. So, Be Warned if you are plugging your device every night for eight hours.
It might start a fire
Okay, to be fair, this is not a common problem, but it’s certainly a scary one. If you do charge your phone at night, there is a fair chance that you can pass out and the phone goes under your pillow. The problem with this is that if your phone is plugged in, it generates heat, as one report pointed out. If you trap the heat under pillows, blankets, and sheets, it has the potential to light up.
It forces the battery to bounce back and forth
Imagine filling a glass of water or juice right up to the brim, taking a little sip, and then refilling it and you repeat this over and over again. According to Time, that’s basically what you’re doing to your cell phone when you charge it overnight. Once your phone finishes charging all the way to 100 percent, the charging process halts, just like how you stop pouring the water or juice right before the glass can overflow.
Even if the phone is doing nothing, it can’t sustain that maximum charge for long, so it will trickle back down (by itself). As soon as a tiny bit of charge is lost, the charger kicks back in, putting it back to 100. So, If your phone is plugged in for eight hours, this constant back-and-forth process will continue all night long, and putting your phone through this torturous process every evening will eventually reduce the battery capacity.
It just doesn’t take that long to charge
Why are you charging your cell phone for about six hours longer than you need to? Way back in 2011, a four-week study published in Pervasive Computing showed that the average charging time for a cell phone ranged from 30 minutes to a few hours, with the “longer” times only really kicking in when people charged their phones overnight. As a result, charging your phone longer than necessary incapacitates the battery.
In a perfect world, you would keep your phone at 65 percent
For years, the idea has persisted that you should always let your battery wind down to the bottom, and then boost it back to a full charge. And that was true for older, nickel-based batteries. According to Business Insider, letting lithium-ion batteries drop to 0 actually wears out the battery faster, particularly if you are always going from a low charge (i.e., under 25 percent) to a high charge (100 percent). It’s actually better for the battery to just do partial charges whenever you have a spare moment.
So, based on this, what charge level should you keep it floating around? The answer, according to Christian Science Monitor, is anywhere between 40 and 80 percent. So never charge it above 80, but never let it drop below 40. But I’m well aware that kind of phone monitoring sounds stressful and exhausting hence it’s not practical.
It’s costing you money
ZDNet found that the average iPhone charger draws about 130W of power a month, or 1.5KW a year. Any chargers that are not factory standard like most can draw 10 times more power. Anyway, if you own a phone, you are rich enough to shrug off some cents or very few dollars a year. I mean, the amount of electricity the phone consumes is so so so so so little such that virtually anyone can afford to pay for the electricity it consumes.
No matter how convenient your charging routine might be, I guess it’s time to find a new approach.
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