Leaving the mobile charging overnight: is it harmful to our phone?

Battery and charging

Leaving the mobile charging overnight is a very common habit among users. This custom has been ingrained among us for a long time, especially with the arrival of smartphones. With older mobile phones this problem did not exist; autonomy was a few days, so when you needed it you charged it and you didn't think about it anymore.

However, for some time it has been said that this custom can be harmful to the battery of our terminal. This can be a problem for users more obsessed with extending the life of the batteries, but what is true in these statements? We see it below.

Is it bad to leave the mobile charging all night?

Short answer: not at all. We could leave it here, but then this article would be very short and we would leave things in the pipeline. Going into a little more detail on the subject, we can say that there is no longer any danger because current phones are prepared to withstand long charging times.

A very simplified explanation (let's bear in mind that at a technical level this would go a long way, but it is not the objective of this article), leaving the mobile charging overnight is not a problem because all modern smartphones have a charge interruption system when it reaches 100%. A minimum amount of current may still be input to keep your battery at maximum capacity, but it will not be as high an amount as when charging normally.

According to Kent Griffith, a researcher at the University of Cambridge specializing in energy storage, in statements to the prestigious magazine Wired, the myth that leaving the mobile phone charging all night is bad is intrinsically related to another: that the phone must be allowed to discharge completely before reconnecting it to the electrical current.

Android battery status

According to Griffith, when a phone's battery is stressed the most is when is fully charged, or fully discharged. We will try to explain this in the simplest way possible.

Think of your phone battery like lasagna. Just like this cymbal, a battery is made up of layers. When a phone is fully charged or fully discharged, the lithium ions that make up current charging units accumulate either on the top layer or on the bottom layer. This causes these layers to physically stretch, which subjects them to physical exertion. According to this researcher, the optimal percentages to keep the battery of any phone working optimally are between 20 and 80% charged.

This, however, does not mean that the phone cannot be left charging when we go to sleep. According to Griffith, and as we just saw, all this does is put the battery under a certain amount of stress. It's not good, but it's not bad. Indeed, thanks to the charge cut-off mechanism, the battery degrades very slightly. This means that we would have to be using the same phone for a very long time before noticing a noticeable change.

Other Myths About Batteries That Have Already Been Busted

The fact that it is bad for the battery to leave the phone charging overnight is not the only myth that users believe when it comes to their terminals. We look at a few below.

Do not use the phone while charging

There is no evidence that using the phone while charging is a bad thing per se. The danger of using the phone while charging is non-existent, although it is true that excessive temperatures are not good for any device that uses electronic components to function.

Why do we say this? Because, when we are charging the battery, an increase in temperature occurs in our phone. Looking at social media is of no consequence, but playing while charging the phone can be a bad combination. Android games, especially the most demanding ones, will demand a lot from the phone, which will make it even hotter.

Force stopping apps helps save battery life

battery saving mode

This statement it is completely false. The myth goes back to the ancient days of Android (back in 2009), when "killing" certain applications that were running in the background helped the phone to work better.

Well, the truth is that if we are removing applications from the recently used ones, or forcing them to stop, what we are actually doing is help the battery discharge faster. Many of the apps are restarted just as we stopped them, which consumes more resources than if we left them alone. Besides, going to stop apps frequently consumes screen time, and the screen is the element of the phone that consumes the most battery.

Disabling GPS and Bluetooth dramatically improve battery life

There was a time when this statement was true; Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks clung to the phone's battery like a mosquito to an arm in summer. Today it is no longer valid. As published on Android Authority, these features add less than an extra 4% to the usual battery consumption of a terminal.

Using a charger other than the one for your phone can damage the battery

This myth it has to do with marketing reasons more than anything else. There are many phones that use proprietary charging standards that influence things like fast charging, and if a particular charger isn't licensed for support, they obviously won't be available when you plug in your phone.

removing that, a large number of current smartphones support universal charging standards, so an unofficial charger can serve perfectly to keep our terminal powered.


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