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Plain and simple: When the Evo is fully charged, it begins running off its battery until you plug it back in. It DOES NOT trickle charge whatsoever after it reaches 100%. When you're using your Evo on the charger, and it's showing full 100% charge, it is running off the battery, not the AC plug. And then when you unplug it, well, we all know what happens next. The battery meter drops insanely fast to the actual charge of the battery, which could be very low, depending on how long it's been sitting idle at 100% on your charger.
So all those times you've charged your Evo overnight, only to take it to work the next day and be at 80% within an hour? Your Evo was running off its battery for what I'm guessing was most of the night. It takes my Evo about an hour to two hours to fully charge back to 100%. Let's say you put your Evo on the charger at 11PM, it'll reach full charge by 1AM at the latest, and then run off its battery until whenever you take it off the charger in the morning.
Workarounds?
1) Turn your Evo off while it's charging.
2) If you must leave it on for an alarm clock, put it in airplane mode and end all CPU intensive tasks to minimize battery drain.
3) When you wake up, unplug it for 10-20 minutes (still experimenting with this number), and then plug it back in to top it off. Once it reaches 100%, take it off the charger, and go about your day.
Try it out for yourself. When your Evo is 100% charged, take it off the charger immediately, and I highly doubt you will lose the 10%-15% within minutes. Please share your findings.
Er... Point of note, mine does it even if I pull it off the charger right when it turns green.
Post some technical schematic or other type of proof that shows that this circuitry isn't available in the EVO. That will prove beyond a doubt if what your saying is true.
That being said, only a group of the most retarded electrical engineers would design a charging system as you've described. It is INSANELY easy to build Li-Polymer charging circuitry that does the following (and it pretty much has to do these):
1. Detects battery temperature, and disables charging as a protective measure. In an emergency case it should shut off the device it's powering to allow the battery to cool down. This is a design requirement, or else your house burns down as you dump water on a Lithium fire thinking it's going to put it out. If you have a HERO, you can easily test this. Running the wireless tethering, GPS/Navigation, and Music with the screen running heats up the phone a ton. You'll notice the status light blink green once, then red a couple of times. This means that it's plugged in but not charging. Cool the phone down and it turns solid red again (charging).
2. Disable charging cycle when battery reaches a certain voltage. VERY SIMPLE voltage detection circuitry! The designer can of course adjust a gap to have charging turn back on when it dips below a certain voltage. Usually since this circuitry can be made with a decent amount of precision, that "turn back on" voltage ends up being roughly when the battery discharges to maybe 99.5%. That's just a guess, I admit but there's no harm in having the circuit switch on and off, even if it's often.
There are also a few other circuits that prevent the cell from blowing up in your pocket, like a current sensor to prevent an overcurrent. There's also some stuff that prevents you from being able to discharge the cell below it's avalanche voltage. In case you don't know what that is, when a Li-Ion battery discharges to a certain voltage, it avalanches to 0 (quickly falls). If it hits that point, you've pretty much ruined the battery and it will never charge the same again.
Anyway, this is stuff they taught and had design labs on back in college. While I have no actual proof that the phone wasn't designed as the OP describes, I find it highly unlikely. If this is the behavior that the circuitry exhibits, I would find it easier to believe that it's a design flaw, probably because some idiot didn't compile the correct bill of materials.
I haven't got any schematics or any sort of technical information on the subject. All I know is, it works wonders for me. When I take my Evo off the charger in the morning, it literally drops to ~90% within minutes. Once it does that, if I place it back on the charger for ~20 minutes, it charges back to 100% and stays there for 45 minutes to an hour.
I'd urge anybody who is noticing the immediate 10% to 15% drop in battery to give this a shot.
I would turn it off while I'm charging it overnight, but I use it as my alarm clock
Me Too
I am seeing the exact same behavior as the OP. This is really lame. Because of this, most people will end up losing 10% of their battery every day. Pretty lame.
I charge my phone overnight every night. Never noticed a problem and I just checked my battery and its at 88% and has been off the charger for 2.5hours so I'm not seeing the rapid discharge issue some people are seeing.
I don't think so man, I leave my screen on full brightness while it's charging, and if what you said was true it would go dead on the charger.
I think it's more likely the cells haven’t charged equally, so you get a big initial drop.
Grims said:
I don't think so man, I leave my screen on full brightness while it's charging, and if what you said was true it would go dead on the charger.
I think it's more likely the cells haven’t charged equally, so you get a big initial drop.
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Click to collapse
I'm beginning to think that once the battery reaches 100% full, it runs off the battery until it reaches some arbitrary percentage. At which point it starts charging until it reaches 100% again, and then continues this cycle.
I'm testing a few other things right now. Part of me is convinced it reports 100% charge when it's actually below that level.
Krynj said:
I haven't got any schematics or any sort of technical information on the subject. All I know is, it works wonders for me. When I take my Evo off the charger in the morning, it literally drops to ~90% within minutes. Once it does that, if I place it back on the charger for ~20 minutes, it charges back to 100% and stays there for 45 minutes to an hour.
I'd urge anybody who is noticing the immediate 10% to 15% drop in battery to give this a shot.
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Click to collapse
I'll try this out to see if I can get the same kind of behavior. I guess I honestly haven't looked to see if the phone drops 10-15% after pulling it off.
Krynj said:
I'm beginning to think that once the battery reaches 100% full, it runs off the battery until it reaches some arbitrary percentage. At which point it starts charging until it reaches 100% again, and then continues this cycle.
I'm testing a few other things right now. Part of me is convinced it reports 100% charge when it's actually below that level.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is what should be happening I believe, but I'd be surprised if it was set to such a huge swing like 10-15%
Grims said:
I don't think so man, I leave my screen on full brightness while it's charging, and if what you said was true it would go dead on the charger.
I think it's more likely the cells haven’t charged equally, so you get a big initial drop.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is an interesting theory. I do know that when you have multiple Li-Ion cells in a battery pack, if they discharge unevenly, you have to go off of the lowest charged cell. Again, if a cell were to drop below the avalanche voltage, you'd ruin the pack all together. On the other hand, the circuitry should let ALL cells charge to 100% so it's even again. Maybe they screwed this up, that design isn't so easy! Perhaps it detects one cell as 100% and shuts off the charge. Therefore, one could surmise that if you started with an unevenly charged battery pack, you'd have an immediate decrease in charge to the rating of the lowest charged cell. The good news (maybe) is that this is sometimes implemented with software. That means that HTC could release a bug fix for this, or if we have a savvy dev, they could try to fix it. We just need to prove the theory though.
This is all just a guess, keep that in mind. If I notice something like this with my phone today, maybe I can tear apart the battery and measure the voltage on each cell (if it even has multiple cells). I have a spare, so maybe I'd be up for this. Krynj (or anyone), if you have the HTC Hero, try charging your battery pack with it, see if it exhibits the same behavior on the Hero itself. If it doesn't, then try putting it back into the EVO and see if after a night of charging, it still drops 10-15% after disconnecting it from the AC.
The reason why the battery dies so fast has something to do with the memory card. Charge your phone and take the SD card out and watch it stay at 100% for a long as time. Then do it again with the SD card in and watch it dip down fast.
Apple laptops don't charge unless battery is below 90%. If you plug in the AC and the battery is above 90%, it will just run off AC power but I don't think the battery drains any then.
My battery life has been less than stellar, but I didn't notice it dropping 10-15% instantly off the charger. I did notice that it'd drop about 10% after driving to work with xiialive streaming, which was unusual to me. The battery would start running out after about 9 hours at work. I'd be in the yellow by the time I got home, and the battery would be complaining for a charge in the evening. So that's roughly 12 hours I would be getting out of the phone after normal use.
Since I'm suspecting an issue with the charging circuitry, I just recently tried charging my battery with the Hero. After it was fully charged, I put it back into my EVO last night and haven't charged it since. It's been running 13 hours, and is still nearly full green. The charge is at about 70%. I've been trying to graph the discharge all day too. It only dropped to 87% over night, dropped to 80% when I drove to work (xiialive), and then down to 74% after I spent some time setting up icons and modifying my home screen. This is...hands down a butt ton better than the past week.
I'm not using 4G.
WiFi is off.
3G is on.
GPS is on.
Not running a live wallpaper.
Sync is running at default settings.
Widgets that could be updating constantly:
I have the Clock/Weather HTC widget running.
I have the Dictionary.com "word of the day" widget.
I have the Friendstream Widget running.
Craigslist Craignotifica app is running, set to notify me with search results.
The results are inconclusive though. Yesterday, I wiped and re-flashed DamageControl 3.2.x from scratch (backed up all apps with Ti-Backup, this means Android Market won't be notifying me if there are app updates -grumble-). So, somewhere between re-flashing and also charging my battery with the Hero caused this turn around.
apollooff320 said:
The reason why the battery dies so fast has something to do with the memory card. Charge your phone and take the SD card out and watch it stay at 100% for a long as time. Then do it again with the SD card in and watch it dip down fast.
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Click to collapse
Interesting.....Will have to give a try. Will report back later.
I'm waiting for some definitive results with the "use another charging device or battery" method. It seems that the EVO just sucks at recharging the battery since people who have used another phone or a separate charger seem to report better results.
I leave my phone off at night and charge it - when I turn it on in the morning it still drops 5-10% in the first 20 minutes. But during the day it drops REALLY slow, so I still can get about 13-16 hours before 15% easily.
I have manual account sync, 3g only, wifi at home, usually gps is off, auto backlight settings for screen, and I don't run too many apps in the background, I just use them when I need them.
Has anybody found a solution to this? It's really starting to bother me. I've noticed that I don't seem to have the issue if I charge -> recovery -> wipe battery stats -> reboot. That kind of leads me to believe that something is inaccurate about the battery stats and the phone instead uses the actual raw value provided by the battery instead of whatever it is that it does with the battery stats.
I can tell you this, I bought two of the cheap battery chargers off of ebay and I have two OEM evo batteries. I don't even plug my phone in anymore. I get an hour of standby at 100% from those chargers and it falls instantly when charging from the phone. I just run them down then swap them out. I couldn't be happier and they are only like 10 bucks each with 2 batteries each.
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jnewkirk10 said:
I can tell you this, I bought two of the cheap battery chargers off of ebay and I have two OEM evo batteries. I don't even plug my phone in anymore. I get an hour of standby at 100% from those chargers and it falls instantly when charging from the phone. I just run them down then swap them out. I couldn't be happier and they are only like 10 bucks each with 2 batteries each.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App
Click to expand...
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can you post a link or ebay or where ever u bought it from?
Try this I'm doing it from the phone
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250641711190&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT#ht_1991wt_913
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apollooff320 said:
The reason why the battery dies so fast has something to do with the memory card. Charge your phone and take the SD card out and watch it stay at 100% for a long as time. Then do it again with the SD card in and watch it dip down fast.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you have apps on your sd card that are running then yes that could be the case. SD cards need power to work but I dont know how much they draw..
From what I have seen, most battery life comparisons/stats are usually done with the phone in standby/screen off majority of the time.
I decided to do it the other way.
Last night to this morning:
I tried charging my battery to 100% but time constraints only had me charge it to around 84% (late for work).
I don't use/have a charger at work nor do I have one in my car. I work 8 hours straight (11pm - 7am) and I almost always stream pandora the entire time.
I am using the seidio extended battery and the only thing that stays off is wifi when I am not within range of any kind of open network (starbucks) or my own saved connection list. 4g/3g, gps, and background data are constantly on.
So, from 84% left the house and started streaming pandora in the car. Get to work about 15 minutes later with no interruption in streaming (just turned the volume down). I do shut off my screen while streaming when I put the phone in my pocket.
Surfed the web, watched some youtube videos, checked gmail and facebook (which auto sync about every hour and gmail notifies me of every single email I get), and played some games here and there (nothing great) throughout the night.
Basically my intent was to never let the phone sit and do nothing. The entire time pandora was streaming (browsing the net and streaming, checking gmail/facebook and streaming) but youtube would always stop pandora.
Got 8 hours of constant use. I don't want to say moderate/light/heavy as that scale changes from person to person. Moderate for one person may be heavy for the next.
I charged the battery in the phone because I don't have an external charger for it. Although I may get one because my charging method still involves me taking the battery out of the phone.
No task killers, no setcpu (I am rooted), no custom rom (from the dev forum).
I am using bakedsnack kernel #4, launcherpro, and I have personally uninstalled a crap load of stuff (even htc sense and rosie altogether).
My opinion is that all these gimmicks that we have to go through to get good battery life while in standy are not necessary. What is necessary is for the charging system in the evo to be revamped. This is my own opinion, but I think the charging system in the evo skips stage 2 of the charging process http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-12.htm which is why (this is what I think, I am no expert) so many people see the sudden drop from 100% down to whatever shortly after they unplug their charger.
It kind of makes sense as to why some people who charge their stock batteries in the ebay externals get better battery life, it's because they are actually being charged properly.
Again, this is just my opinion and I am in no way an expert on this. Just disclosing my experience and observations of my phone and it's behavior. Take from it what you will.
That's pretty amazing dude. Me personally would consider your use for this test to be pretty heavy. I'm more than impressed to see 37% battery life. And from what I've been reading up on the external charger is definitely the way to go. Although it's quite a pain to have to charge our evos like this just for maximum battery life. Hopefully in the future releases of phones we won't have tis do things like this. As mentioned in another post the switching of the battery to charge it will eventually make the back door loose or maybe even break sooner than planned, which is a problem for people who don't have extra doors. I guess it's not a bad investment to buy extra doors though.
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lovethyEVO said:
From what I have seen, most battery life comparisons/stats are usually done with the phone in standby/screen off majority of the time.
I decided to do it the other way.
I am using the seidio extended battery
My opinion is that all these gimmicks that we have to go through to get good battery life while in standy are not necessary.
It kind of makes sense as to why some people who charge their stock batteries in the ebay externals get better battery life, it's because they are actually being charged properly.
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Click to collapse
Here is my take and i edited your post down to the points i am discussing.
First I like the fact you realize most battery tests and many of the people getting ridiculous battery life are idle most of the time (even if they say they are moderate use normally they have 1-3 hours of moderate use out of the 30 hours battery life they claim). I think showing actual usage time is much more impressive.
Now if you are going to do a battery post and talk about opinions and what your battery life is ... i don't suggest using an extended battery. you show that over aprox 8 hours of use (wont classify it as heavy moderate etc since you didnt) you lost about 50% the problem here is the extended battery from seidio has a much larger capacity then your standard htc battery that comes with evo (even if it doesnt actually have the 3500mah it is still a lot more). On a est i did i could play a movie on a stock battery for just over 5 hours before the battery drained using nothing but the stock install of a rom and without changing settings to turn things off etc. So in my opinion the battery life you are showing is actually a little low for that battery but that not really the point.
now as for the evo charging incorrectly. the reason why peoples batteries drop quickly the first 20-30 minutes (for most who have a correctly calibrated "battery") is because EVO doesn't have a trickle charge. this doesnt mean the evo isnt charging the battery correctly. the idea behind not having a trickle charge is it helps prolong the life of the battery it self at the cost of 0-10% charge depending on where it is when you take it off the charger.
While i personally would rather have the trickle charge and have to buy replacement batteries more often. it isnt that the evo charges incorrectly it. They jsut made the choice to try to make the battery itself last as long as possible at the cost of some battery use time depending on when you take it off the charger.
These are my latest seidio 3500 numbers with correct battery conditioning. Going to try and duplicate these numbers. Most of about 10 hours was slacker and pandora. This was from 100 to 14 percent on 3500 seidio. Pics for your pleasure and debate. I was able to get another 8 hours standby from this point and hour of lets golf before battery died. That was my 2nd conditioning of the battery. Going on 3rd full slow trickle charge up now. The trickle charge on battery wall charger takes about 12 hours wtf but worth it. I just use my cheap china 3000mah to cover the time.
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omegasun18 said:
Here is my take and i edited your post down to the points i am discussing.
First I like the fact you realize most battery tests and many of the people getting ridiculous battery life are idle most of the time (even if they say they are moderate use normally they have 1-3 hours of moderate use out of the 30 hours battery life they claim). I think showing actual usage time is much more impressive.
Now if you are going to do a battery post and talk about opinions and what your battery life is ... i don't suggest using an extended battery. you show that over aprox 8 hours of use (wont classify it as heavy moderate etc since you didnt) you lost about 50% the problem here is the extended battery from seidio has a much larger capacity then your standard htc battery that comes with evo (even if it doesnt actually have the 3500mah it is still a lot more). On a est i did i could play a movie on a stock battery for just over 5 hours before the battery drained using nothing but the stock install of a rom and without changing settings to turn things off etc. So in my opinion the battery life you are showing is actually a little low for that battery but that not really the point.
now as for the evo charging incorrectly. the reason why peoples batteries drop quickly the first 20-30 minutes (for most who have a correctly calibrated "battery") is because EVO doesn't have a trickle charge. this doesnt mean the evo isnt charging the battery correctly. the idea behind not having a trickle charge is it helps prolong the life of the battery it self at the cost of 0-10% charge depending on where it is when you take it off the charger.
While i personally would rather have the trickle charge and have to buy replacement batteries more often. it isnt that the evo charges incorrectly it. They jsut made the choice to try to make the battery itself last as long as possible at the cost of some battery use time depending on when you take it off the charger.
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Click to collapse
50% loss over 8 hours of near constant use (my awake time shows that it did manage to sleep somehow even though I streamed pandora constantly) on any battery (extended or not) is actually a good thing as it shows that even with the phone fully bogged down (almost all radios on) it can last a full work day (which is what most people are concerned about).
I still believe the evo does not charge the batteries correctly and it is not solely related on the absence of a trickle charge.
Again, from my observations over the course of the past three weeks. I started with what my battery was calibrated to according to the phone. Let it drain down to about 15% (according to the phone) and wiped the battery stats and did a different charging method from the htc "rain dance".
Here is where my opinion of the evo not charging properly comes into play.
From 15% to 100% charge (charged while phone and screen are on to monitor voltage, temp, mA draw, etc.) took about an hour +/- a couple minutes. As soon as the led turned green (yes, I literally sat at my phone watching the percent slowly rise) I unplugged the charger and noted the resting voltage level and percent (according to three seperate battery status applications). Once noted, I powered down the phone. After the screen completely shut off I removed the battery and tested the voltage. I did this for my own information because I wanted to verify the phone itself was actually reporting the voltage levels correctly. It was.
Now, recall that I had just charged the phone to 100% and had wiped battery stats prior to charging.
Replaced the battery back into the phone and powered up. Normally people see a jump in battery percentage when they power down and back up. Not in my case. To my amazement, the evo reported my battery as being at 78% charge level. So I went from being 100% charged down to 78% percent charge all from powering down, removing the battery, checking voltage, and then replacing battery and powering up. Time to power down, remove, check voltage, replace and power up is somewhere around the one minute mark +/-.
Again, referencing the link I provided earlier about charging li-ion batteries, the evo seems to skip stage 2 of the charging process which usually results in about a 70% charge (according to the link).
Charged it again from the 78% mark to 100% and the charging time took just over an hour to get back to 100%. Same routine, check voltage on phone, power down, remove battery, check voltage on mmeter, replace battery, power on, check levels.
Second time around I dropped from 100% charge to about 89%. Voltage levels were always accurate. Charged again and took about another hour +/- and finally achieved a charge to where it would not fall or rise between a power down (97% seems to be my cap which is fine since I don't want to truly charge the battery to 100%).
To test the discharge rate I tried my best to keep the battery running condition identical for each discharge run.
I monitored the battery temp, cpu temp, battery voltage, amp draw, and cpu load.
Streaming only pandora and nothing else I usually managed to keep the amp draw to around 300 - 360mA with the screen on. This was my way of measuring the discharge rate without access to equipment that could give the battery a steady discharge load.
Every time the percentage dropped one I would note the volts, temps, amp draw and cpu load. Across the board temps and cpu load remained close to constant as the phone wasn't doing too much multitasking.
At this point, I have about 4 full voltage readouts from 100% down to 15%. Without wiping battery stats, if I charge the phone with my method (charge to 100%, power down, remove battery, replace battery, power up and recharge) my past voltage readouts coincide with my battery readouts on the phone (87% falls within a certain voltage range and so on) but if I just charge the battery until the phone says it's 100% then the readouts on the phone no longer fall within my past readouts until I go back to my charging method. This tells me that if I let the evo charge the battery the way it is programmed to (hardware or software) then it is not actually charging the battery to its full potential (not necessarily 100%).
Across the board the cpu load and the temps rarely drastically changed as it wasn't running multiple tasks at once. This is just my own observations and tests that I did/started doing for my own intellectual reference.
I have done the same charging method with my wife's evo and stock battery (1500 htc oem). I wiped her stats but only managed to get two full voltage readouts with her phone. She has stated that her battery does last longer than before and she is only rooted to remove bloatware. She is running stock rom, stock kernel, no task killers, no memory managers, and her radios and settings are close to mine (she gets more mail and facebook notifications than I do).
Again, this is just my opinion and personal observations. I did this solely because I got tired of having to constantly turn things on and off just to use them. My past phones never had this problem and I don't think the evo should have to be babied just to get good battery life. I still believe it all lies in the charging system of the phone and not necessarily the battery (extended versus stock).
Hey, what battery conditioning did you guys do? There's a ton of different suggestions and I am wondering if one or two have finally been proven to not be placebo.
I decided to do the HTC charging method when I changed roms to cm6. I went into hboot after and wipe stats. Turned on and took about 20 minutes to get to 98% using internet. Anyways I let phone die. Plug it in and I have system monitory with history monitoring. So I go to bed, and wake up to expect 100%. Nope 80%. Checked the monitor and trickled from 80% to 70% for 2 whole hours. I did the HTC thing again for full charge. Repeated. Only charges to 80%!!!! I changed roms. Same thing.
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martyzidek said:
I decided to do the HTC charging method when I changed roms to cm6. I went into hboot after and wipe stats. Turned on and took about 20 minutes to get to 98% using internet. Anyways I let phone die. Plug it in and I have system monitory with history monitoring. So I go to bed, and wake up to expect 100%. Nope 80%. Checked the monitor and trickled from 80% to 70% for 2 whole hours. I did the HTC thing again for full charge. Repeated. Only charges to 80%!!!! I changed roms. Same thing.
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Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Your situation also points to my opinion that the charging system on the evo does not charge correctly. I am also thinking that the battery stats dont play a huge role but I still jave more monitoring to do.
I also prefer the constant-use benchmarks, and did one myself as well. Charge to 100% and then stream DI.fm using XiiaLive (96Kbps MP3) through WiFi (router in same room) + full brightness + screen ON (no timeout). My poor Evo lasted 3:55 before forced shutdown . Btw, running Fresh v3.1.0.2 with netarchy v4.1.8-cfs, no SetCPU or any other "battery saving" tools.
frifox said:
I also prefer the constant-use benchmarks, and did one myself as well. Charge to 100% and then stream DI.fm using XiiaLive (96Kbps MP3) through WiFi (router in same room) + full brightness + screen ON (no timeout). My poor Evo lasted 3:55 before forced shutdown . Btw, running Fresh v3.1.0.2 with netarchy v4.1.8-cfs, no SetCPU or any other "battery saving" tools.
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I am at work now and when I get home I plan on charging the stock battery as best as I can and doing another constant use run to satisfy the crowd who run the stock battery.
I charge my phone overnight, from around 10PM to 8AM, then I leave my phone charging in its dock from about 9AM to 5PM during the work day...
any harm in doing this? I'd like my phone to last quite a while, as we are currently in a serious relationship, and I don't plan on letting her go....
What hurts your phone battery is not charging it but keeping it on high temperatures for a long time. And guess what keeps it on high temperatures: yep, you guessed it, charging for a long time.
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While it always depends on the charging circuit, keeping your battery topped up by constant charging (even trickle maintenance) will reduce the voltage level that it can be charged to. This will take quite some time to notice, and several deeper charging cycles will "repair" this to a certain extent. But with any battery, keeping it any constant level will reduce its charging capacity, and continual charging (trickle or otherwise) will "cook" the batteries chemical make up sooner.
To do what you're doing everyday will absolutely have an impact on your battery's health over the long term. But to exactly what extent is based on several factors I don't have specific data on.
Absolutely, our phone battery is designed for mobile usage, not to be tethered to a charger constantly. Constant charging is unnecessary, wasteful and leads to early battery demise.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using xda premium
And aren't our high end modern phones also designed to trickle charge when it gets to %100, so no harm can come to it?
caliber177 said:
And aren't our high end modern phones also designed to trickle charge when it gets to %100, so no harm can come to it?
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I suppose it depends on how you define "harm". Read my post above again. Any level of current that is continually supplied to a charged battery will accelerate the aging of it.
Even if the charger were to shut off completely, and then resume charging at a certain level (which I believe is the behavior of the LG wireless charger at 95%), continually discharging and recharging from 95% to 100% is probably not ideal.
But all of this is probably not all that great of an affect in the grand scheme of things. You're not gonna kill your battery in a matter of months by leaving on the charger all of the time. Yes you will accelerate the degradation of the battery's health over time, but if your phone is in use enough so the battery is being discharged regularly between charges, I doubt that you will notice it for a long time, if at all.
I can say that if you simply leave it charging 24/7 without any other kind of use you will be able to measure degradation surprisingly soon. As to how noticeable it will be is very hard to say.
I use and suggest Battery Monitor Widget from 3c. It takes the guess work out of what you see when you're charging and what happens to the phone when it reaches 100%.
As the phone gradually reaches 90%, charging is noticeably slowed. From about 92-100% it trickle charges from around 300 to 200 to 100mA until it reaches 100%. Charger stops charging when full and lets the battery level drop slightly before charging it back to 100%. You're constantly topping it off at full and batteries of this chemistry don't like that.
As far as I can recall, these types of batteries actually thrive on being run down and cycled back up. The only catch is, don't run them down until it's completely dead. You've significantly cut the life of your battery if you do it quite often.
To answer your question, it probably doesn't hurt that much. If you do it for months, maybe years. Yeah, you'll see some degradation.
desynch- said:
As far as I can recall, these types of batteries actually thrive on being run down and cycled back up.
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I would correct this and say the battery loves being near the median. Store at 40% battery! 100%-0% is bad... 100%-10% is better, 90/10 is better etc...
80/40 is really good for preserving charge cycles. Basically, charging at 30% back up to 70% is better than letting it go down to 0%
Note: this is a REALLY good battery in this phone. Just USE it until you feel it's dying too soon and buy a new one. Batteries are cheap and will be cheaper in 2-3 years.
But we can't buy battery for this phone.. I always let it run down to 14% that's when the warning message pops up.. Then back up, charges in 2 1/2 hrs then I leave it on an hour more until I leave from work so I could have a full phone.. Note, I work over nights, so its dead at around 2 or 3 am sometimes, then I leave at 6 am..
Sent from my Nexus 4
Please... I would say we can in a few months! Most of us have already voided the warranty
Sent from my Nexus 4 using xda premium
Most of us in here don't keep our phones long enough to notice any battery degradation..
Just charge it as often as you can but unplug it when it's full.
To be safe I would let the phone idle off of the work charger and only plug in at home.
dralways said:
To be safe I would let the phone idle off of the work charger and only plug in at home.
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Agreed, I only charge once a day and it's usually sufficient, if your a heavy user and are concerned about the phone dying at night, let the phone decharge normally throughout the day and plug it in an hour or an hour and a half before you leave, however long it takes to charge the device after a workday's worth of usage (Whatever that is for you)
I do this myself if I'm using my phone heavily during the day and know I'll be out all night. Like some said you'll probably never even notice the degradation, but when you know it's not good for the battery in the strictest sense why risk it, the phones aren't designed to be charging 2/3rd of the time, they are designed to be charged and then taken off the charger and used.
This is a topic that I don't think has been covered here yet, but is very important. Especially because we cannot replace our batteries.
I'm interested in finding out the best way to prolong the life of our batteries. In other words, I want it to continue holding a charge as close to specs as possible.
I am NOT talking about extending the use we get out of one full charge.
Upon googling, I found these two useful articles:
http://lifehacker.com/5875162
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries
From reading those, this is what I gather:
We should not leave our devices plugged in at 100%
Best practice would be to use phone until 50% then charge
Charging to 100% actually causes the battery stress. Charging to 90% or so is better.
I think these few facts are right, since my Thinkpad has a function that stops charging at 90% and doesnt start charging again until below 60% (or whatever values you choose).
What I'm not sure about, is what has HTC done to help prolong battery health?
Does our phone automatically switch to using power straight from the charger at 100% instead of charging and draining the battery simultaneously?
Does any phone do that?
Battery health is likely the reason why our phones charge so slowly. Slow charging = less stress = better battery health.
I've also emailed HTC to see if they have any tips. Their manual contain no tips.
UPDATE:
Okay, so HTC got back to me.. amazingly quick. lol
Its a long email, which I wont paste here, but the one important part is this:
It is better to unplugged your phone from the wall once the battery reach 100% and once the battery indicates that the battery percentage is about 15% you should plug the phone to the wall charger.
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That is what the guy said, word for word. The rest of the email diverges and talks about general battery saving tips.
So what the HTC rep says seems to fall in line with the three points I got from the articles I read.
Only difference being HTC recommends going all the way down to 15% before charging.. Hmm
Honestly, considering most of us get a new phone after a year or so, we're not going to see any huge hits in battery performance even if we don't follow these "rules". Not to mention I'm REALLY not going to wake up in the middle of the night to unplug my phone just so it doesn't stay at 100% all night. Just charge the battery in whatever way's the most convenient.
Useful post thanks for sharing.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using xda app-developers app
jason27131 said:
Honestly, considering most of us get a new phone after a year or so, we're not going to see any huge hits in battery performance even if we don't follow these "rules". Not to mention I'm REALLY not going to wake up in the middle of the night to unplug my phone just so it doesn't stay at 100% all night. Just charge the battery in whatever way's the most convenient.
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You might be right. But I bet there are a few people out there who are on 2-year contracts or just don't think they'll give up their HTC One so easily.
I personally love the design of the device and want it to last as long as possible.
I haven't felt this way about a phone since my Xperia X1, which I did eventually give up because I already replaced the housing twice, the mainboard was starting to have issues, and Windows Mobile 6 was just **** lol.
Anyway, under normal use these batteries should be fine for a bit. But unintentional abuse can wear them down faster than you think. At least thats what I get from these articles. And thats been my experience in the past with laptops and cellphones.
I too probably wont be waking up at night to unplug my phone or buying a timer to automatically stop charging my phone. But when I can adhere to these guidelines, I'll try my best to.
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jonny68, no problem, glad this is useful.
These batteries have electronics to protect them, you wont be doing the battery any damage how you use it other than using your phone a lot and putting a lot of cycles through it. They never let you drain your battery 100% and they never let your charge 100%, it just shows 0-100% for the ease of the consumer. You cannot over charge your phone, if you could there would be a lot of issues out there.
Fact is just use your phone how you use it.
Terrorantula said:
These batteries have electronics to protect them, you wont be doing the battery any damage how you use it other than using your phone a lot and putting a lot of cycles through it. They never let you drain your battery 100% and they never let your charge 100%, it just shows 0-100% for the ease of the consumer. You cannot over charge your phone, if you could there would be a lot of issues out there.
Fact is just use your phone how you use it.
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But that isnt entirely true.
Yes, our batteries now have mechanisms to stop overcharge and deep discharge.
But these same mechanisms do not provide longevity. Instead, our batteries are geared more towards providing the most use per charge without damage.
It is done this way for obvious reasons. It also means we have a choice about whether or not we want to sacrifice a small bit of convenience or capacity now, for a better battery later in time.
For example, this chart from the second article I linked shows that if you charge only to 90%, your battery can go through double the charge/discharge cycles before dropping to 70% health as compared to charging all the way to 100%
Quote from the article:
"Should I disconnect my laptop from the power grid when not in use?” many ask. Under normal circumstances this should not be necessary because once the lithium-ion battery is full the charger discontinues charge and only engages when the battery voltage drops. Most users do not remove the AC power and I like to believe that this practice is safe.
Like i said, this is all pointless, because 100% of us charge our phones overnight, and 0% of us are willing to wake up 3 hours into our sleep to unplug it at 90% or 100%.
jason27131 said:
Those talks about voltages, not charge level btw.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_charge
Reading voltages is one of many methods of determining how much charge is left within a battery. Hence the other column in that table.
You cant just stick a meter on a battery and read how many mAHs are left.
EDIT:
jason27131 said:
Quote from the article:
"Should I disconnect my laptop from the power grid when not in use?” many ask. Under normal circumstances this should not be necessary because once the lithium-ion battery is full the charger discontinues charge and only engages when the battery voltage drops. Most users do not remove the AC power and I like to believe that this practice is safe.
Like i said, this is all pointless, because 100% of us charge our phones overnight, and 0% of us are willing to wake up 3 hours into our sleep to unplug it at 90% or 100%.
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Right, and that is true for some laptops as some of them do tend to have more sophisticated battery management software/hardware. I mentioned my own Thinkpad and its functions in this OP.
I was curious as to if our phones do the same thing as laptops; disengage the battery at 100% charge and run off AC only. But it does not, as per HTC's reply suggesting phones should be unplugged once at 100%.
And for your other point, I already addressed that. I'm not saying this is essential or that everyone should follow these guidelines. But to some people this does matter, and this post is for them.
As for myself, I'll use yesterday as an example.
I got home from work at around 6:30PM, my phone was down to 30-40%, so I plugged it in.
Before I went to bed, the phone had hit 93%, so I unplugged it and left it there with wifi on.
I wake up, its lost like 3-5%, no big deal.
Around lunch time its dropped to 30% at work, so I plugged it in.
It reached 89% a few minutes ago, so I unplugged it.
So when its convenient for me to do so, I follow these guidelines. If I know I have a long day ahead with no access to a charger, or if I need to charge overnight, then so be it, I'll let it sit at 100% until I have to leave.
Technically speaking this is all correct and a guideline to try to follow. That's all. If it's impossible to do, the phone will be okay. That being said, I am of the belief that if there is a better way to do something, we should at least try to do that. I for one love this device and may never sell it. This is one of those iconic builds that I wonder how much more of its class we will see. Even right now as the music pours out of these front speakers, my love for it grows.
I just wanted to add my 2 cents. And this little tidbit:
Every 100mv less than full charge you apply, will double the lifespan of the battery. So, a rough approximation,
Charge the phone to 100% (4.3v) , discharge to about 15% You'll get roughly 250-500 cycles.
Charge to 90% (4.2v) down to 15, you'll get 500-1000 cycles.
80% (4.1) 1000-2000 cycles.
Cycle count will increase by avoiding deeper discharges...
In a perfect world, you could potentially get 2000-3000 cycles by
1. Charging to 80% or ~ 4.1v
2. Avoiding discharge below 30% or ~ 3.6v
3. Avoid extreme temperature changes and prolonged exposure to temperatures above 45c
Most of this comes from personal experience and much research. Check out battery university if you get some time.
Sent from my HTC One using xda app-developers app
By last do you mean until the battery reaches 70% maximum capacity? Honestly, at 1000 cycles, thats already good enough since thats 3 years worth of charging at roughly 1 cycle a day. I doubt I will keep this phone past 2 years.
m0nz said:
Technically speaking this is all correct and a guideline to try to follow. That's all. If it's impossible to do, the phone will be okay. That being said, I am of the belief that if there is a better way to do something, we should at least try to do that. I for one love this device and may never sell it. This is one of those iconic builds that I wonder how much more of its class we will see. Even right now as the music pours out of these front speakers, my love for it grows.
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That's exactly how I feel, and the reason why I started the thread :victory:
Your figures fall close to the ones in the articles, so it sounds bout right.
Im curious though, does unplugging/replugging have any effect on the charge/discharge cycle?
For example, if i'm charging my phone but i need it for something, I unplug it, use it, and plug it back in.
That shouldn't have any effect am I right?
You have to define what you mean when you talk about how long a battery "lasts".
We're specifically talking about deterioration in capacity over time.
The battery will "last" for 100,000 cycles in the sense that you will still be able to charge it and it will still be able to power a device on its own for a period of time. The question is how short does that period of time get before you say "this battery isn't useful anymore"
This came up in another thread and the threshold discussed there was 80% of original capacity. Apparently HTC rates the One's battery "lifetime" as 500-700 charge cycles until the battery capacity drops to 80% of its original level. (You also have to define charge cycle: charging from 0-100 or anything that adds up to that, such as charging from 40 to 90 on one day followed by charging from 40 to 90 on another day - counts as one "cycle".)
So this battery could "last" - in the sense that it will still have 80% of its useful capacity - for 3000 cycles if you follow some of the more conservative approaches above.
I don't know how typical my behavior is, my last three phones were bought via two year contracts, each phone was replaced after about one year, when the next-generation model appealed to me.
Don't imagine too many buyers of "flagship" devices keep their phone for over two years.
Sent from my HTC One using xda app-developers app
NxNW said:
You have to define what you mean when you talk about how long a battery "lasts".
We're specifically talking about deterioration in capacity over time.
The battery will "last" for 100,000 cycles in the sense that you will still be able to charge it and it will still be able to power a device on its own for a period of time. The question is how short does that period of time get before you say "this battery isn't useful anymore"
This came up in another thread and the threshold discussed there was 80% of original capacity. Apparently HTC rates the One's battery "lifetime" as 500-700 charge cycles until the battery capacity drops to 80% of its original level. (You also have to define charge cycle: charging from 0-100 or anything that adds up to that, such as charging from 40 to 90 on one day followed by charging from 40 to 90 on another day - counts as one "cycle".)
So this battery could "last" - in the sense that it will still have 80% of its useful capacity - for 3000 cycles if you follow some of the more conservative approaches above.
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Hm, yea I should update my OP with that info. The articles I referenced seem to define a battery's lifetime as the number of cycles it can go through before hitting 70% of original max capacity.
paul_59 said:
I don't know how typical my behavior is, my last three phones were bought via two year contracts, each phone was replaced after about one year, when the next-generation model appealed to me.
Don't imagine too many buyers of "flagship" devices keep their phone for over two years.
Sent from my HTC One using xda app-developers app
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Not sure, but in the past I've always seemed to kill my phone's batteries before I replaced the phone itself lol.
If I look back now, that was probably because I always drained to 0% and let my phone stay plugged in at 100%. So basically I was always doing the worst thing possible, short of literally cooking my battery >.>
Nippero said:
Hm, yea I should update my OP with that info. The articles I referenced seem to define a battery's lifetime as the number of cycles it can go through before hitting 70% of original max capacity.
Not sure, but in the past I've always seemed to kill my phone's batteries before I replaced the phone itself lol.
If I look back now, that was probably because I always drained to 0% and let my phone stay plugged in at 100%. So basically I was always doing the worst thing possible, short of literally cooking my battery >.>
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I really don't think that's it. I have done that with EVERY phone i've had, GS3, Nexus, etc. After a year i didn't see any major battery difference, and I plug it in at least once a day, sometimes 2 times.
jason27131 said:
I really don't think that's it. I have done that with EVERY phone i've had, GS3, Nexus, etc. After a year i didn't see any major battery difference, and I plug it in at least once a day, sometimes 2 times.
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The difference may be how much we use our phones then, because with my last phones I typically used my phone quite frequently at work since many websites are blocked. Including open source code sites which actually help me with my job... stupid corporate proxy.
Anyway, I used to leave my G2 and Photon Q plugged in all day at work and at night. So thats 16hrs of being plugged in per day... Probably wasnt good for them.
But hey, if you're right and I'm wrong, I'll be even happier cause that means my battery will be fine no matter what I do lol.
However, battery deterioration isn't a myth, and it does happen. Only question is, how much does it happen.
Nippero said:
The difference may be how much we use our phones then, because with my last phones I typically used my phone quite frequently at work since many websites are blocked. Including open source code sites which actually help me with my job... stupid corporate proxy.
Anyway, I used to leave my G2 and Photon Q plugged in all day at work and at night. So thats 16hrs of being plugged in per day... Probably wasnt good for them.
But hey, if you're right and I'm wrong, I'll be even happier cause that means my battery will be fine no matter what I do lol.
However, battery deterioration isn't a myth, and it does happen. Only question is, how much does it happen.
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Ya i tend to just leave it overnight for about 7 to 8 hours. Sometimes during the day i might plug it in for an hour or so to grab some juice on my s3, something i haven't had to do on my One which is awesome (get about 2 days worth). Battery deterioration definitely does happen, but hey, if I have enough juice at the end of a year to still last me a day, I'm happy
I'm always on a 2 yr contract, no need to really worry about this, but good info none the less.
dont worry op .. ill put my battery in the many " to be taken care off" list.
ill make sure its in the list.
somewhere
If the ONe is anything like the HoX, the charger stops charging at 100%, then lets it drop to 95% before restarting trickle charge. However, the 95% battery state isn't immediately shown on screen, so many people use their phone then see a whole 5% jump downwards almost immediately. I haven't paid much attention to the HO yet, so I can't comment
So I was a bit skeptical about practical use cases for the fast charging. I made a general observation after the first few days. It's currently completely not scientific. But it seems when I disabled the fast charging, my phone seemed to handle battery life way better. Idk how efficient the energy is when done via fast charge, but I've always heard that a slow steady charge is better for lithiums.
I figured maybe this could cover the impacts of fast charge and whether people have noticed similar things. (Day 4)
h3ck said:
So I was a bit skeptical about practical use cases for the fast charging. I made a general observation after the first few days. It's currently completely not scientific. But it seems when I disabled the fast charging, my phone seemed to handle battery life way better. Idk how efficient the energy is when done via fast charge, but I've always heard that a slow steady charge is better for lithiums.
I figured maybe this could cover the impacts of fast charge and whether people have noticed similar things. (Day 4)
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Looking forward to your findings!
I disabled fast charge the day I got it. Seems pointless to me since the only time I charge is at night. It's a cool feature if I need a charge in 20 minutes but the note 3 I gave my wife would charge in no time as well.
Battery life is great so far for me.
Sent from my SM-N910V using XDA Free mobile app
I've been testing this as well. I leave fast charging on and I'm seeing an easy 14 or so hours off charger with 4 to 5 hours screen time.
Fast charging is incredible. My last charge cycle I recorded was 56% to 98% in 28 min. That's about 1.5% per minute. Though I suspect soome non linearity as it gets closer to 100%.
As far as the longevity of a charge based on regular or Gast charging . There will Likley be no correlation. The charge circuit will handle the incoming current appropriately and the battery is built to handle it. I am a EE and am intimately familiar with battery technology. The charger itself changes its output voltage for fast charging (stepping up the voltage but lowering the current) and I'm at sure there is some software as well as special hardware controls in place to ensure the battery is charging effeciently.
The usual problem with charging batteries too fast is due to heat build up in the battery. However, these new batteries were developed to solve these problems. I wouldn't worry about it.
Here are my results with just over 3 hours of screen time
Sent from my Galaxy Note 4 on Verizon unlimited!
I love quick charge. Nuff sedd lol!
After a whole day on wifi in the office plus weak cellular signal inside the building destroys the battery, I plug it in for 15-20 minutes and I'm good for a whole night. Love it.
Sent from my VK810 4G using Tapatalk
18 hours off battery, 4hrs screen time, and still 19% battery.
I wouldn't care if fast charging destroyed my battery every 6 months. I'd buy another for $20, but it's not going to do that.