When charging a phone wirelessly, there is sometimes significant heat generated. That combined with higher charging rates that are now coming out with the Qi 2 standard make me wonder what the ideal charge for the battery would be.

Most of the time I just toss my phone onto a wireless charger before bed, and don’t really care how quickly it charges. Would it be better to use a 5W brick with a charging pad? Should wireless be avoided and usb used instead?

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Technically, wired charging degrades the battery less than wireless charging, mainly because of the excessive heat generated by the latter. The same way slower wired charging generates less heat. Lower and upper charging limits also help (the tighter the better).

    But I personally don’t bother with it. In my experience, battery degradation and longevity mostly comes down to the “battery lottery”, comparable to the “silicon lottery” where some CPUs overclock/undervolt better than others. I’ve had phone batteries mostly charged with a slow wired charger degrade earlier and more compared to almost exclusively wireless charging others. No battery is an exact verbatim copy of another one. Heck, I had a 2 month old battery die on me after just ~20 cycles once. It happens.

    Sure, on average you might get a bit more life out of your batteries, but in my opinion it’s not worth it.

    The way I see it with charging limits is that sure, your battery might degrade 5% more over the span of 2 years when always charging it to 100% (all numbers here are just wild estimates and, again, depend on your individual battery). But when you limit charging to 80% for example, you get 20% less capacity from the get go. Unless of course you know exactly on what days you need 100% charge and plan your charging ahead of time that way.

    Something I personally could never be bothered with. I want to use my device without having to think about it. If that means having to swap out the battery one year earlier, then so be it.

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
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      2 months ago

      Yeah I got lucky with my battery; it’s at 800 cycles currently and still holds plenty of charge for my daily use. A replacement kit is also only $50 so I figure there’s not much point in trying to be efficient for a marginal lifespan improvement. I’ll probably end up replacing it when it hits 1000.