- Don’t expose your battery to any heat! Heat will degrade the inside of your battery, shortening its lifespan. This means not leaving your battery in the sun, in your car on a hot summer day, or under your pillow while you sleep (that’s not safe anyways). You may want to also take off that absurdly large case while you charge your phone – charging generates heat, and that case keeps all that heat trapped near your battery.
- If you’re not going to use your battery for a while, don’t store it at 100% charge. This will never apply to your cell phone, but it’s a pretty important tip for all your other devices. Contrary to what common sense would lead you to believe, storing your devices at 100% charge is a bad idea – it actually makes them lose charge faster, and shortens the lifespan. Leave them at 40-60% charge when they’re going to sit on the shelf for a while.
- Try not to let your device drain to dead zero. Your battery doesn’t like this very much. It prefers to be charged as soon as you get low, instead of being taken down to its last drop of life every day. However, on the flip side of that….
- Don’t charge your device to 100%! Your battery doesn’t like that either, and it’s ESPECIALLY unhappy if you leave it on the charger overnight. Take your device off the charger as soon as it hits 100%, or even shortly before that.
A battery approaching the end of its life is something we’ve all experienced, whether it was with our cell phone or maybe our car. Just like humans, the healthy batteries tend to live a bit longer than the unhealthy batteries; but what constitutes a healthy battery? In a previous post, we discussed how batteries die because they slowly degrade over time. A healthy battery is one that degrades at a reasonable pace; an unhealthy battery is one that degrades more rapidly. The reason for this difference in degradation? Mostly you… There are a few easy things you can do and watch for in order to extend your battery’s lifespan. If you implement some of these practices, your cell phone battery might just make it to that highly anticipated 2-year mark, when you get to update to the next latest and greatest phone.
