Are you reading this on your phone right now? If so, what’s your battery percentage like? Because most of us use our phones on a daily or even hourly basis, there’s a high chance that your phone has lost a lot of its charge since this morning. Of course, that’s completely natural. Just as we are less productive when we have run out of juice and need a little snack, phones are exactly the same. They need the charge to continue serving you your fill of memes and YouTube videos, which is why most of us decide to charge our phone when it dips below 100%. There’s something so satisfying about having a phone that’s fully charged, but you have to be careful. This is why you shouldn’t overcharge your phone.
It’s all about the battery
Cell phones are designed to make use of their rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Can you imagine if we had to replace the batteries every time it lost its charge? Thankfully, we don’t have to carry spare batteries in our pockets, and can instead rely on our chargers to do the job for us. Thanks to these batteries, our phones can normally go from 36% to 100% in the space of just a few hours. It’s a quick process, but then we have to do the same thing again and again when the juice runs out throughout the day. If you find that your battery doesn’t last as long as you’d hope, then it might be because you’re overcharging it.
Charging overnight
After a day of scrolling through Instagram and checking your emails, your phone is probably in desperate need of some charge. Because of this, the most logical option is to charge it overnight so that you can wake up with a fully-charged phone that will last you (hopefully) another day. The good thing to note is that you can’t overcharge your phone to the point where it completely burns out the battery. Your phone is designed to stop drawing current from your phone charger once it reaches its full battery capacity, but just because you don’t use your phone overnight doesn’t mean that it doesn’t use battery.
The trickle effect
Although your phone stops charging when it reaches 100%, it starts to charge your phone once again when it dips below this during the night. So, even when it trickles down to 99%, it will once again reboot itself and start charging again. This constant on-and-off of your phone charger ultimately increases the ambient temperature of your phone, which will then have an effect on your battery as a whole. The temperature will reduce the capacity of your battery, which means that it will lose its charger much quicker as the months go by. This is why so many people have to replace their phone batteries every so often.
Choosing what’s best
If you’re worried about what overcharging your phone can do to the battery, then it’s best not to charge it to 100% each time you plug it in. This can cause immense stress on the battery, and will not do it any good over time. So, it’s best to leave your phone on a high charge, but not a completely full charge.
How often do you charge your phone? Well, it seems as though you might want to change your charging habits to save your battery.
