Does discharging your phone before charging it save battery life?
For something that barely leaves our palm and that is a mobile phone, it naturally has a power that runs out quickly! But there are plenty of tricks to preserve the battery life of our devices as much as possible, while there are great rumors circulating on the same subject.
The most important of these is the trick of letting the mobile phone completely drain its energy before we recharge it, and here the biggest disaster for the phone battery falls! In fact, anyone who owns an electronic device, no matter what and especially a smartphone , faces many challenges that are common to every other device owner. The biggest of these challenges is the problem of battery life and the ways we go about it every time in the hope of preserving it.
Admittedly, it's usually fresh battery life; It is the type of lithium-ion used in smartphones, between 2 - 3 years, or about 300 - 500 charge cycles as classified by the manufacturers. After that, the battery capacity will decrease by about 20%. This is normal! But oftentimes battery life drops faster than that, your charging habit over the years may have silently ruined your phone's battery health in the number of times you've drained and recharged your phone. So, if you want to know why completely draining your phone is such a bad idea, and you're interested in some simple strategies to extend your battery life, read on!
Does fully discharging the phone before recharging it preserve battery life?
The rechargeable batteries we use in smartphones, tablets, Bluetooth headsets, laptops, and similar electronic devices are usually lithium-ion. This type of battery is not intended to be completely discharged before being charged again. Thus, the answer is unfortunately no, quite the opposite, using the full charge in the battery before recharging does not help extend its life. Rather, this practice negatively affects its longevity and therefore the results will be contrary to our expectations.
What happens when you recharge the phone battery?
In fact, since most modern electronic devices use lithium-ion batteries, it makes sense to understand how these batteries actually work to be satisfied with the answer to our question. When a lithium-ion battery is connected to a charger, the lithium ions flow in the opposite direction, that is, from the cathode to the anode, so that the anode again retains plenty of lithium ions. At this point, the battery shows 100% charge. Many smartphones these days come with fast charging technology. With fast charging, batteries typically charge in an hour or about 80%, then slowly charge from 80% to 100%, taking about another hour to reach full charge.
Why shouldn't the battery be completely discharged?
As we emphasized earlier, it is not a good idea to completely drain your battery to zero before plugging it back in to recharge. This is a very unhealthy practice, and can quickly wear down the battery components and life. There is no memory effect in lithium-ion batteries in this practice as was the case with older nickel-based batteries, which were notorious for something called the memory effect! In fact, lithium-ion batteries are smart enough to know their actual capacities, even if you're randomly charging and discharging between any values from 0%-100%. You won't forget its actual capacity just because you don't completely empty it to recharge it again.
Thus to provide a completely healthy charging process; Remember that lithium-ion batteries hate being fully charged and fully drained. What I prefer to keep it life long is to keep its charge somewhere between the two ends (full charge and drain), which is the middle gel in between. So there is a nice rule to follow, which is the 80:20 rule to keep your battery healthy for a long time. That is, charge it until it reaches 80% and then recharge it again when it drops to about 20% and no less.
Leaving your battery to drain to zero frequently places an undue burden on the materials inside the battery. That is, it can cause cathode mechanics to deteriorate or side reactions with the electrodes. It could potentially decay up to 70% of its original capacity in just a few hundred cycles! Likewise, fully charging the battery and keeping it plugged into the charger all day can make the battery wear out faster.
In short, you do more harm than good if you drain your phone's battery to 0-1% each time before recharging it. Therefore, the best thing you can simply do to extend your battery life is to run it in the 20-80% range. So be extra careful, and always compromise for much better results!