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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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Most high-quality LiPo-powered devices already do this at the hardware-level. The 100% level you see on the software is usually 80% actual charge on the battery.
Any way to tell? I just got a monster phone with a 22K mAh battery.
For Android, there are a multitude of apps, such as Wattz that will tell you the actual voltage of the battery. Full may be 4.2V or 4.35V depending on the chemistry used. ACCA (root required) will let you limit charge rates and stop charging at a certain percentage.
Staying under 4 volts (around 60% for most phone batteries) will vastly extend battery service life. 80% is a bit less extension, but still far better than charging to 100%.
i was looking for something like acca since forever
foss discoverability needs some mad work
I just use Home Assistant + smart switch
how do you do it?
Just set up an automatic to turn the switch off when the battery reaches 80%. Then back on when <75%.
that doesn't answer the question of whether there's a way to tell that their battery is limited to 80% on hardware level, though.
Unless it's lying about the voltage itself, you can be pretty sure it's not limited if it charges to 4.35V. 4.2 is a little more tricky if you don't know for sure whether 4.2 is the full voltage for the cell.
That's one hell of a battery
What phone is that‽
I don't know, it says "Heavy duty" on the side.
Apparently the name is Doogee V Max EDIT: or Unihertz Tank
Curious too
https://oukitel.com/pages/oukitel-wp33-pro
Thanks!
Late reply:
https://oukitel.com/pages/oukitel-wp33-pro
This replaces my old phone, Bluetooth speakers, battery banks, all that. Hella heavy, but so is all that other crap. I can drop it 5' deep in the swamp, go down and get it. Still testing!
Jesus Christ that's a car battery
omg kilo milliampere
k = 10^3 and m = 10^-3 so they will cancel out. It’s just Ah without any prefixes at that point.
My phone has a 10.8Ah battery and it's huge, no idea how big that must be.
Charge it from a smart power supply from battery at 1 to 100% then it can show you the number of mah/h it took to charge it.
I have this power supply which also has USB-C https://a.aliexpress.com/_mrChiQ6
Not sure how accurate this would be as charging is not 100% efficient. Also the amount of power the phone uses while charging would have to be taken into account as well.
22Ah at 4.35V would be 96Wh, which iirc is just under the limit of 100Wh you can take on flights in the us, and thus the limit for basically all laptops.
mAh are a terrible way to measure capacity, look for watt-hours instead. You need to know the voltage for it to be a relevant measurement
It's a pity they don't offer the option to 'supercharge' to 100, so you get extended battery life when desired, when you know you will need it. Say, going camping, or plan to use the phone a lot for whatever reason.
Turn it up to 11!
Yes, they could call it spinal batt.
So can I charge my phone to 11?
It's one more than ten, so yeah, it's better.
Yea that's what I've heard, and I personally keep stuff plugged in
It was a recent article by iFixit, so I thought I'd share it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
80% "software" should keep the battery even healthier...
Isn't the charge limit of the battery arbitrary? The manufacturer can set whatever target voltage they want , so it's meaningless to say they limit the battery to 80% when they decide what 100% is.
Yes
Do you have sources?
I don’t doubt the fact that they take some margin to extend the lifetime of the battery, but if we take iPhones as an example, they:
This makes me suspect that that the margin between what’s reported in software as 100% and the actual capacity of the battery is less than 20%. This also makes sense from the standpoint of the consumer expecting a long battery life on their expensive high-end device, putting pressure on the companies to make the margin smaller and the charging algorithms smarter. Just my observations, of course.