As the tech world develops and more smartphones are released, people realize just how many ‘bad’ charging habits there are.
Charging a phone can be pretty straightforward, but there are actually a lot of charging habits or routines that can simply end up putting more strain on the phone itself and its battery. One of the most notorious of those habits is keeping your phone plugged in overnight. We took information from tech experts to break down why it’s one of the worst things you can do. Read more about what they had to say below.
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Why You Should Stop Charging Your Smartphone To 100% Overnight
For a lot of people, their evening routine looks a little something like this: they get ready for bed by changing, brushing their teeth, setting their alarms, and maybe killing some time by reading a book or scrolling through a few social media apps.
Then, they plug their smartphone into its charger, then plop it on their nightstand or put it down beside them in bed and forget about it until the next morning. This might seem like not only a harmless thing to do, but a logical one, as most smartphone users would want to wake up with a fully-charged phone. However, this habit might be doing a lot more damage to your phone than you may realize.
"Keeping your iPhone plugged in at 100% charge for 8 hours nightly will quicker kill the health of your battery than anything will," explains tech pro Paul DeMott. "Lithium batteries don't like being held at full charge for long periods of time, because the high voltage stresses the battery. Your phone hits 100% at around 2 am, but then it sits plugged in until 7 am in this stressful state for hours on end."
If you want to defend your device against this kind of battery strain, something you could do is ensure your phone's battery optimization settings are enabled. For iPhones, it's called Optimized Battery Charging, and for Androids, it's Adaptive Battery. Using these settings helps ensure that if your phone ends up being plugged in for a long period of time, it won't go up to 100%, but more like 80% as not to add extra pressure.
"iPhones have optimized charging such that it does not reach 100% until just before you wake up, which helps a lot, but most people disable it," adds DeMott.
