TL;DW: Fast charging over 2 years only degraded the battery an extra 0.5%, even on extremely fast charging Android phones using 120W.
And with that, hopefully we can put this argument to rest.
However the Battery Saver mode on Androids that only charges the battery up to 80% DOES extend battery life. Substantial evidence shows that a high State of Charge accelerates degradation through: solid electrolyte interphase growth, loss of lithium inventory, and loss of active materials. (See: mdpi.com)
Here’s a fun fact: phone manufacturers know this. So what they call “100%” is not actually 100%. Your phone will not charge your battery to full. Battery charging is already designed around this.
Got proof? I’ve not cracked open a phone for a while to see if the component labelling matches the interface, let alone tested capacity of an extracted battery directly.
He’s not talking about 80/20 limits. he’s talking about material breakdown at extremes. Not all manufacturers spec in 80/20 limits. AFAIK, only Samsung actually lets you stop it completely at 80, the rest just try to let it sit no higher than 80 all night.
If they were saccrificing 40% of runtime to keep you from having to replace your battery, that would 100% be in the sales pitch.
And honestly, that article isn’t a great source of truth. A number of the statements in there are inaccurate or, at the very least, misleading.
Charging beyond 100% or below 0% is mostly BS. The proper max voltage of the battery is a physics thing, they are in equilibrium at 4.7 / cell. Picking at a low power limit is up to the manufacturer and their choice in power distribution circuitry. He asked the chemist if you could overcharge or overdischarge a battery and mistook that as an answer that it was feasible to overcharge/overdischarge them.
“Leaving a charger plugged in at the wall and turned on wastes energy False (well, maybe a tiny bit)” This is still true for many chargers, and calling it out as a little bit in his own arbitrary numbers is disingenuous.
“Batteries perform worse when they’re cold False (mostly)”
Rest assured, your C rating is wildly affected by temperature; he’s trying to again call it out as slight, which is making his own narrative.
“Powering off a device occasionally helps preserve battery life False”
The whole time your phone is on, you are charging or discharging. Those cycles wear on the battery any time you shut your phone off, you are in the least damaging mode for your battery, especially if it’s around 50% or so.
“Using an unofficial charger damages your phone True”
100% BS, using a crappy charger might damage your phone. Buying a quality 3rd party chager is no problem at all.
The author doesn’t appear to have a strong electronics background and he didn’t ask the right questions or fully understand the importat parts of the answers
“And if too much current is delivered to a battery, that could mean ripping out too many of those lithium ions and leading to the same kind of degradation you read about earlier. That’s not to say that all off-brand chargers will be this bad, Griffith notes, but you’re still probably better off sticking with an official model.” is not the same as “Using an unofficial charger damages your phone”
Article rests on one expert. That assistant professor’s publication list doesn’t seem to contain evidence about it, plus the quotes in the article don’t directly say it happens.
Maybe it does, but that article only seems to be guessing based on (admittedly reasonable) theory.
That depends on the manufacturer, some do, some don’t. My phone has a setting to control the max charge, so I set it to 80% when I got it.
Yes, but that 100% is not really that. It has been programmed to display that percentage, when i reality its 80%.
No, I’m saying that not all manufacturers have that limit, and it’s a relatively new setting (last few years). If you have an older phone or something not from the top few manufacturers, it might not have that feature.
This is like spinal tap. Yeah but my phone charges to 110%. I don’t think you understood what they’re trying to say. Changing what 100% means isn’t a setting or “relatively new”
No, they’re saying that some hardware manufacturers report 80% as 100% (as you noted) while others do not. Just like some manufacturers report 5% as 5% while others report 10% as 5% with the realization that most people misjudge when they’ll be able to charge.
I’m saying when your phone charges to 100%, some manufacturers take that to mean 80% of capacity, whereas others actually charge the battery to 100% of capacity.
Exactly, which is neither a user setting or relatively new. Battery manufacturers have always had to decide what voltage is what state of charge (percent).
The user setting where you limit it to 80% is on top of what the previous commenter was describing
I always find the same study referenced, which was good science but also almost 30 years old. I wonder if this is still true for modern batteries?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know there haven’t been significant changes in Li-Ion and LiPo batteries aside from extra density - which would only increase the effect. But it seems like solid-state batteries are starting to hit the real world now
I bet thats wrong, but I know ….
There’ve been usage changes
- iPhone has “Optimized Charging” where it predicts usage and tries to keep about 80% charge until it expects you to use it
- iPhone has “Adaptive Performance “. Maybe not charging but tries to gradually ramp to “low power mode” to be gentler on the battery
- all phones likely have refined charging curves to match battery technology
It is, but phone manufacturers know this and already programmed their charging circuits to take it into account.
But if you’re using 18650 cells or some other lithium based battery for other purposes (vapes for example), it’s something to keep in mind.
It’s as if engineers knew what they’re doing.
Granted, with all the planned obsolescence happening, you could also argue that engineers “knew” what they were doing.
Planned obsolescence happens but it’s not as common as most people think it is.
If engineers were the ones in control that would mean something.
As I see it, phone manufacturers have zero reasons to keep the battery degradation low, but many reasons to push advertised capacity and charging speed. If you were cynical, you could also assume that they’re trying to make sure the battery doesn’t last too long because they want to keep selling new phones.
“And with that, hopefully we can put this argument to rest.”
That’s not how the internet works, but nice try though ;-)
I disagree!
You fool! You fell into the classic blunder! All this time it was I, Dio!
You guys joke and all, but fast charge induces bigger heat and then translates in more harm for the batteries (which will affect more in hot places).
If we want to close this discussion forever I think all the anxiety that comes from this subject at all is due to the fact we can’t easily replace the batteries, if we could (with the normal-ish battery sizes we have today), I don’t think this test would be even worth doing.
While that seems obvious, I’ll disagree
- phones have a charging curve that takes into account heat, battery level and probably more factors specific to battery health. Most of the additional charging speed is likely minimal effect
- You can have a battery replaced on even the latest iPhone for $99 or less, and I expect most phones to be cheaper. Yeah it’s not really diy nor replacement cost only, but it’s just not that bad relative to the cost of the device. Sure I’d rather spend $20 and replace my own battery, but if I’m spending $1,000 on a new phone, then $99 every 3-4 years for batteries is just not that bad
Betteridge’s law of headlines: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
„Is drinking Paint thinner really as bad as everybody says?“
Are we talking about water-based paint?
I believe that paint thinner does contain water
Water-based paints can be thinned with water, so technically water is a paint thinner… which is safe to drink.
Corollary:
How not following trends and drinking paint thinner boosted my B2B sales
Well. It could be worse than what everybody says
Ok, before i watch the video, no damage is not what great scott found from his testings… ( https://youtu.be/iMn2yVoEqPs ).
so i have no idea what to believe anymore, but my (based) experience is that it does damage it. Ill have to watch later.
Yea, but that wasn’t a great rest. I love Great Scott, but a lot of comments fairly call out his conclusion.
Most (all?)phones don’t charge at full speed to 100% charge, they fast charge when the battery is almoast empty, and charge slower the more full it gets.
Right, so basically he removed the software aspect in his tests which removes systems to protect the battery. I assume without them, it is damaging, like what great scott found.
Ye, he should have continued his experiments then!
TL;DW: No
I love when YT amateurs act as if they are able to produce proper studies that are relevant in any fucking way
If you have a problem with it, tell us why.
I personally prefer a proper peer reviewed study over amateur YT slop
Person: offers you an apple
You: “Personally, I prefer organic, homemade apple pie! Not APPLE SLOP!”
Sorry, but it’s more like a crab apple.
It looks like an apple, it’s presented like an apple, it’s advertised like an apple because that is what makes the YouTuber money. But scientific methods and standards exist for a reason. It’s very easy to produce bad data and especially easy to extract bad conclusions from data if you have an incentive to do so (such as a fan base who might engage with the video less if the conclusions were against their expectations)
There’s a chance that this guy’s conclusions reflect what a proper study might have found, but it’s just too hard to tell if it’s a crab apple or not it’s essentially probably a little better than chance.
Exactly, when it comes to highly complex chemical and electrical engineering and physics (as is the case with Smartphones and their lithium-ion batteries), I will take it as an inditcator if it comes from well-established testers with professional equipment like GN (Gamers Nexus) or other established technical journals when talking outside of the video world, but will not accept it as a general and genuine technical (!) insight until it has gone through the due process of scientific publishing and peer review…
Even then I prefer meta-studies, since they reduce biases and general inaccuracies.
I have no skin in the game but I have worked professionally as both an academic scientist and a data scientist in the private sector and I can tell you that peer review is great but a lot of legitimate research is done outside the bounds of academic journals. It is entirely possible for amateurs to do real science.
If the effect size is large enough, you dont actually need to be that rigorous about it. No one needed to do a study on whether there was a direct correlation between adverse medical outcomes and gunshot wounds to the head.
I personally know don’t trust the little (probably superficial) insights I have into the topic enough to be able to gauge this; neither do I have the energy to put into discerning slop creators doing it for clickbait with some backyard engineering or genuinely correct amateurs.
I like to outsource that to proper channels, I understand that it’s probably not 100% fair every single time, but as I said, I have neither time nor energy to judge it properly myself
That’s a great TL:DW;
Now I want an iPhone that can charge in 20 minutes. :)
Wish granted, the battery is now small enough to slow charge to full in 20 minutes.
Tap for spoiler
The iPhone air is great, isn’t it?
This isn’t a fair like-to-like test though. They used iPhones, which use one battery and then for their 120W test they used iQOO 7, which has two batteries that charge in parallel. They aren’t testing the charge rate effects on a single battery, but just how different phones behave.
While it’s an okay test to see how certain models of phones hold up, it’s not a test for longevity of a single battery using fast and and not-as-fast charging.
So the title, as it often is these days on YouTube, is misleading.
I always thought that charging beyond 85% or so is what degrades batteries. The LiPos of my quadcopter actually actively reduce their charge if left sitting somewhere for a longer period of time. To prevent them from going up in flames.
It does, but the battery charge controller in your phone already does that. What it shows you as 0-100 is 20-80 of the actual battery. Others may or may not.
Do you have more info on that?
Best source I can find: https://eugen-barilyuk.medium.com/how-i-realized-android-battery-percentage-wasnt-serious-enough-0310e484d874
3.7v is 0%, 4.2v is 100%. But a lithium battery can go higher and lower, it’s just that doing that can harm the battery, perhaps spectacularly. OEMs just narrow the voltage range to extend life. When you set a charge limit, it narrows that range further.
I hadn’t watched the video yet, but my phone’s going the opposite way. It run slow charge overnight when it feels like it’s going to be enough for it to be fully charged the next morning.
We really should let electronics and tight software take care of these little things.
If you’d watch the video you may realize it’s not needed.
The point is that I never had to care about battery management for years. I just leave the phone doing its thing. Not that it’s useful or not useful to do so.
The whole point is that I leave that in the hand of people that know.
Well not charging to 100% all the time will improve your battery life, and if you keep your devices a long time and have a usage pattern that allows charging it less like I do (I leave mine on a wireless charge pad at work), then it makes sense to make some adjustments to that particular setting.
Nah, I can’t be bothered by that. And the only device’s battery I really had issues with was a seven years old laptop, years ago. BMS and software will almost always know better than the user these days.
Max charge level is not something the BMS can decide for you because it’s a trade off between battery health and daily charge level. That’s why they ask you to choose.
My phone tells me every night that it’s slow charging and it will be full by [the time I have my alarm set for].
Pixel 8 Pro.
iPhones do this as well, I assume both will also do it without the alarm as mine has simply learned what time I take it off the charger normally.
That works if you have a correct sleep schedule… this feature only enabled like 20 times in my life, and half the time it disabled itself because I used my phone during the night
Non-magnetically-aligned wireless chargers are far worse than fast charging.
[citation needed]
https://www.ifixit.com/News/94409/wireless-charging-trading-efficiency-for-convenience
It’s true, but wireless charging is still inefficient and should be avoided.
