I am doing research on best practices for my lithium batteries and lifepo4 powerstation. There’s some conflicting opinions and variation for cycle numbers.
Will leaving my things plugged in at 100% hurt it more than constantly unplugging at 80% and replugging at 20%?
If this is an Android phone, go install Accubattery and do what that says. It’s designed for many different phone batteries and associated tech (e.g. overcharge circuitry).
There are so many different models and variations in the electrochemistry, general advice is usually a miss.
If you insist on generalizing lithium tech, keep it between 30-80% charge for good longevity. The extremes of full and empty are rougher on it.
If it does battery pass through (supplying power directly from the outlet instead of using the battery as a middleman), leaving them plugged in should be fine. If it doesn’t the battery will repeatedly charge and discharge and and depending on the charge level limit that can be very degrading.
Charging the battery to 100% does do more damage than if you practice 20-80. However doing so limits the battery to 60% of its original capacity. Unless the battery is low quality or over stressed by default, it might take thousands of cycles until the gains from lower degradation outpace the losses.
I think the comfort factor is the most important tho. If you need to manually keep track of the battery and unplug it once it reaches 80% (and risk forgetting to plug it back once it gets low), just replacing the battery when it degrades might be the better option. If you can control it automatically, doing so would only be beneficial.
My understanding is that it depends on the device, and most modern devices take care of what’s best by themselves
That’s not true.
Lithium batteries have a longer useful life if not allowed to drop too low or charged too high. 20% and 80% are typical values. Ideally they would be at 50% SOC and that’s why most batteries in new devices will arrive charged to around 3.6-3.8v.
This creates a problem for device manufacturers because if they force the device to treat the battery well, users won’t get as long between charges. They will sometimes give you options (most laptops will have a setting to stop it charging beyond 60% or 80%, some phones will have a setting to stop it charging to full) but they’ll advertise the full battery runtime they can squeeze out while damaging the battery and that will be the default setting.
Convenience dictates that you may need to charge above, or discharge below, the recommended levels. Which would be much less of an issue if batteries were easily replaceable. But increasingly, they’re not.
tldr; manufacturers have zero incentive to make sure their devices treat the batteries well
manufacturers have zero incentive to make sure their devices treat the batteries well
as long as they survive the warranty period
Title says plugged in and body says plugged in at 100%; these can be separate concepts if one has fine control over the charging voltage.
Will leaving my things plugged in at 100% hurt it more than constantly unplugging at 80% and replugging at 20%?
Plenty of academic research out there showing that pegging Li to 100% SoC reduces cycle counts to EOL (by electrolyte degradation and other processes), especially at higher voltages/temps. You didn’t mention capacity reduction associated with charging at freezing temps so I assume that is a non-issue in your use case.
It seems to me that if leaving it plugged in is an option you have shore/mains/grid power. So I’d
- charge to middling SoC and unplug the powerstation (according to the manual); and
- run the loads off the wall socket
Am I missing something here?
offgrid with LiFePO4
I live offgrid with Li on a very limited budget, so performance and maximal cycle life is a practical matter for me. Based on my own reading and experimentation I charge my 4S LiFePO4 to 13.8v (3.45Vpc) until Absorption falls to 0.10C then quasi-float at 13.31v (3.3275Vpc). I warm them to 50F and charge at ≤0.4C.
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