Why Charging Your Gadgets Over 80% Is Such a Bad Idea | iFixit News

Otter@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 457 points –
Why Charging Your Gadgets Over 80% Is Such a Bad Idea | iFixit News
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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‽

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.

My phone has a 10.8Ah battery and it's huge, no idea how big that must be.

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