Should I Leave My Cell Phone Battery Plugged In Overnight | My Phone Not Charging

Should I Leave My Cell Phone Battery Plugged In Overnight | My Phone Not Charging

Is plugging a smartphone overnight to charge a bad idea? This is a question most people may ask to get the correct answer.

The surprising thing is that most people have fallen victim of this act before now, just before bedtime, you plug your smartphone into its charger so that it can get a 100% charge while you sleep through the night. The idea of doing this, is just to wake up the next day with a fully charged battery on your smartphone. Nevertheless, one might have heard that charging your smartphone overnight damages the battery and eats away at its charge capacity over time, so one turns to Google for fast answers.

So before I get into the nitty gritty details of this post on "Should I Leave My Cell Phone Battery Plugged In Overnight | My Phone Not Charging", I will give you the shortest possible answer first. Yes! you can leave your smartphone plugged in overnight. Well the "Yes" does not mean that we should not keep to the good practice of charging our phones. Below a things we need to know to make your smartphone battery last longer.

Lithium Battery Vs Nickel Battery

We are aware that the majority of today’s technology runs on lithium ion batteries. Before now, batteries were mainly made of nickel just like the Duracell and Energizer batteries you normally buy in stores. The Nickel-based batteries exhibited a tendency to have a cyclic memory. If the Nickel battery were not given full charges in between cycles, they might “forget” their full capacity and remember the point to which they were last charged as being the maximum capacity. Many of us have never used nickel-based batteries before in our mobile devices since the transition to lithium ion had occurred by the early 2000's.

Lithium-based batteries do not suffer from the memory phenomenon exhibited by the nickel batteries. The Lithium batteries plays a major part in the mobile phone revolution/production. For one good thing, the lithium batteries are able to hold a lot of power while remaining fairly compact in size, which allowed mobile phones to become increasingly more smaller and thinner. Also, lithium batteries have a much better lifespan and recharge fairly quickly. The only one set back of the Lithium battery is that it is temperature sensitive.

Heat: The Silent Battery Murderer

Heat: The Silent Battery Murderer

Now we get to the most significant threat to any lithium-ion or lithium-polymer battery, which is heat. Well the funny thing is that, batteries dislike cold just about as much as they dislike heat, but the latter is more relevant when it comes to leaving your device plugged into its charger overnight to charge. Charging temperature for lithium-based batteries i.e, the temperature at which the lithium battery is capable of receiving a charge is 32° to 113℉. While, lithium-based batteries can discharge at temperatures as low as -4℉. Nevertheless, Fast-charging technologies work best at a warmer temperatures between 41° and 113℉, with no charge capable of occurring when the temperature is lower than 32℉.

However, there are couple of important things that these temperature figures tell us. First, a lithium-based battery can discharge at temperatures far below freezing, so keeping the lithium battery in your kitchen freezer will not prevent them from self-discharging. Second, a lithium ion battery warms up as it charges. As  lithium battery gets warmer, it charges faster. But since a battery cannot hold more than its capacity, after reaching a full charge the battery expends the excess power by giving it off as heat. So overnight charging becomes a problem when a battery has no way to reroute the incoming current after reaching its full capacity.

Smartphones use battery power smartly

Batteries used in modern day mobile devices are still mostly the same as they have been for almost two decades now, but the devices that these battery power have become much, much smarter as the case may be. Nowadays, we have less to worry about when it comes to the battery health because power optimization has been put on the shoulders of the software running these devices.

Thus, we get to the answer of our main question here: Should we leave our smartphones plugged in overnight? The answer to this question is a resounding sure, why not?

As we have clearly discussed above, the main danger encountered in leaving a smartphone plugged in overnight was allowing the battery of your device to get hot and remain hot through the rest of the night. Phones can stop charging when the battery has reached its maximum capacity and the phone begins to use the connected charger as its primary power source, allowing you to wake up to a fully-charged battery while your phone remains powered on through the night. It’s a pretty sweet deal right!

However, that is not to say that your charging habits cannot have an effect on the health and longevity of your phone battery. While you are not at risk of overheating your battery by leaving your phone plugged in overnight, I will still walk you though a number of tips that you can incorporate into your charging habits to keep your device’s battery in a good shape and condition.

Smartphone battery charging best practices

As we have it, lithium-based battery is capable of a finite number of charge-and-discharge cycles. With each cycle, the capacity of the battery is very slightly reduced, so we want to avoid as many complete cycles as we can.

Try to keep your battery’s charge level between 40% and 80% power. Of course, this won’t always be possible, but try not to let your phone’s battery level get below 40% too often and keep the number of complete top-offs to a minimum.

Then try not to use fast charge every single time you charge your phone battery. Most rapid fast charge systems cause the battery to become very hot, which we now know is absolutely bad for your battery. If you are using the fast charge option every single time, the battery is getting excess heat more often than it should, resulting in a shorter lifespan of your battery.

Earlier in this discussion, we mentioned how lithium ion batteries do not suffer from the same cyclic memory of nickel-based batteries. While that is true, the internal power meter in your smartphone i.e the part that determines the phone battery’s current power level can sometimes get thrown off. You can recalibrate by simply doing a full discharge-and-charge cycle: Use your phone until it dies. Once it is dead, then charge it to full capacity while leaving its power off. Finally, power your phone back on and make sure it reads as fully charged i.e 100%, if it does not, power off and continue charging. Repeat this process once a month or so to make sure your battery is functioning optimally as the case may be.

Conclusion

Finally, the battery is one of a smartphone’s most important component after all, a smartphone with a dead battery is little more than a paperweight. So it goes without saying that we surely don’t want to do anything that would damage our batteries and make them less efficient. Although there are some who still believe it’s a bad idea to leave your phone plugged in overnight, all signs point to overnight charging being a completely valid way to make sure you start your day with a full charge on your smartphone.

So now, what do you think about overnight charging? Have you ever noticed a difference in the capacity of your device’s battery after charging overnight? Do you agree or disagree with our findings? Sound off in the comments below with your thoughts, i will be so happy to read them. Have a nice time with you smartphone 

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