Expert explains why people should not charge their phone's battery to the full

Owning a smartphone comes with its pros and cons. While it may be helpful in a lot of ways, one of its cons would be its battery life. At some point, we all might get tired of our smartphone's inability to hold charge. If so, you are not alone, as many platforms online are filled with people complaining about the same thing. As it turns out, there is a way in which you can increase the longevity of your battery, surprising us all. Recently, a battery scientist and engineering consultant, Jill Pestana–who goes by @jillpestana on TikTok–explained why people might not want to charge their phones to 100%. 

The video started with Pestana reading a question asked by her follower, "Does charging your battery to 100% break your battery faster?" She said, "You may hear that you should charge your devices to 80% of the capacity. First, I wanna just say that you can charge your device to 100% capacity, and it's going to work fine." Pestana further added, "But if you want to extend your battery life, 'swinging it' is the way to go." She explained that swinging the phone means to "never fully discharge your battery and never charge. The reason for this gets down to the chemicals."

She said how the smartphone and electric vehicle batteries have positive electrodes called "cathode materials," which started to degrade when fully charged. "When you're fully charged, you have the minimum amount of lithium in the cathode. When you take out a lot of the lithium in the cathode, the cathode structure can collapse, and different defects can form in the crystal and lattice," she added. "This is called lithium nickel mixing, where you have lithium going into spaces where nickel should be, and nickel goes where lithium should be. They just mix around inside of that lattice," she shared.

So, the thing is that when the cathode structure collapses, the battery cannot hold as much lithium as it did when it was brand new. In the video, she said that there was nothing to worry about if you have been charging your phone till it's fully charged and that this hack is only to extend the battery life. "So the kind of caveat is that different battery chemistries react differently at different states of charge, so with like nickel-based cathodes, they don't like being fully discharged, meaning they don't like it when your battery is fully at 100% capacity, but other capital materials, it's totally fine to charge till 100%," she added.

All in all, it all boils down to the battery chemistry in your phone. Pestana also talked about the "charge rate" and said that "using the right charger for your technology is important to make sure that it's being charged at the right rate, so you don't get any kind of degradation effects from weird high charging rates or something like that." Many took to the comments to express their views. "Here's the thing. The phone manufacturers already hide the top end and bottom end of the battery from you. So we are all already not charging 100% or discharging 100%," said @WPC. "The phone was designed to report 100% charged, but the battery is physically charged to 90%, so it's already taken care of," added @SatoshiNakamoto.

You can follow Jill Pestana (@jillpestana) on TikTok for more battery science content.