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Why Charging Your Gadgets Over 80% Is Such a Bad Idea | iFixit News
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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Depends who you ask. To manufacturers it's a brilliant idea. It's not a mystery that no electrical engineer knows that Li-Ion batteries don't like to be fully charged. It's just that manufacturers realized that charging 100% means you battery will die at around 2 year mark or 600-1000 charge cycles and that will be enough push for some people to buy a new device while at the same time your device seems to last longer on a single charge. Charging to 80% or 85% significantly extends life span of a battery. At that point chemistry almost doesn't degrade.
And it's not just with mobile devices and batteries that this is happening. Engineering with a plan to fail at specific time has become a precise science. Making something that will last forever is not that difficult, just not lucrative to them. Take for example LED lights. Manufacturer states 50k hours at 3.1V for white LED. Reduce that voltage down to 2.5V and you have basically made it infinite but it glows less, so to compensate you'd have to add more LEDs and that hits their income. Big Clive has a great video on the subject.
This should not only result in government regulation where artificial battery killing is prohibited, it should result it jailing execs who decided this was a good idea.
I don't know, I have a bunch of years old Sony Konion vtc5 and vtc6 18650s, they're constantly loaded and drained, I guess some have thousands of cycles. Of course, they're not new anymore, but even my oldest ones, 7 years plus, are ok. They still give 34 ampere for quite some time, so no problems here. Got some even older no-name ones in akku packs, 10 years old, not so many cycles, no problems there either. Maybe because I never charged them quickly and with adaptive voltage?!?
There are 18650 batteries with protection circuit and without. It's basically over-charge, under-charge and high temperature protection. More info. When charging any battery higher voltage means faster charge and it's usually not a problem. What is a problem is heat generated. If you can't dissipate heat fast enough, then you have a potential problem. Slower charging is always safer.
And all charging processes are adaptive voltage to a degree. Say you are charging 18650. Your charger will start with target voltage and constant current at 500mA, and watch the voltage in the battery raise. Once voltage reaches target it will remain constant but charge current will slowly drop. Once there's no current going in, battery is full at that voltage level. Some chargers will push more current in, some will try higher voltage initially then switch to target voltage. Higher current can be a problem due to chemistry stability and heat but higher voltage should generally be safe. You can even revive some of the old batteries that no longer have any charge by shocking them with higher voltage shortly.
Also, good charger matters a lot.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
great video on the subject
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