Put it on the floor, or in the shade.”Ĭircumstances where your phone or laptop are fully charged and extremely hot should be relatively rare and, as such, relatively avoidable. “If you’re in a car in the summer, don’t put it on the dashboard.
“The combination of full charge and warm actually causes more stress than usage,” Buchmann warns. The most stressful thing that can happen to your phone’s battery during regular use is not, in fact, being discharged, or even being empty. To be very warm and fully charged at the same time. “But other than that, it’s not advised to fully cycle lithium-ion.” What's the worst thing for my phone's battery? Cycling your phone from 100 percent, down to zero, and back up has a very limited utility in that it can “recalibrate” a battery if it’s doing strange things like dying out of nowhere when it claims to be decently charged, says Buchmann. Lithium-ion batteries like to be charged in short spurts, so plugging in for five percent here and 10 percent there is not only fine, but advisable. “In that mid-range use, you get far more cycles than if you fully charged and discharged as we do on our cellphones.” Is it bad to charge your phone multiple times a day?
“You’ll typically charge to about 80 percent and discharge down to about 20,” Buchmann says.
In a perfect world, your battery never goes below 20 percent, and also never above 80 percent.Įlectric vehicles, with batteries that are required by various regulations to have a minimum operational life on the order of several years, make that prospect more feasible than it is for your phone by using drastically oversized batteries that are purposefully designed to never be fully charged. At what percentage should I charge my phone? While older nickel-cadmium batteries did have a “memory” that could be disrupted by anything other than a full cycle from full to empty, your modern lithium-ion battery abhors both extremes. The Best MagSafe Cases for Your iPhone Is it bad to run your phone down to zero?Ĭharging your battery all the way up is less than ideal, and to make matters worse, so is discharging it down to zero.