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 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.
I’m not sure if the general advice for lithium ion batteries will apply to lithium iron phosphate batteries.
For lithium ion batteries, I like to charge them during the day rather than leaving them plugged through the night, but that’s because I don’t know if I can trust the BMS (my father would keep his phones plugged whenever he was home and every single smartphone he owned eventually had inflated battery syndrome, even though I warned him many times, I don’t know if he still does that or not, but his current phone shows no sign of inflating yet).
My previous phone was a Sony phone, and their smart battery management tool allowed the phone to charge to 80% (or 90%, I don’t quite remember), stop, and only start charging so it would be full by the time I usually wake up, which I thought was rather smart. I often charge to 90% rather than to 100% when I know I won’t need the full 100%, but if I know I might not have an opportunity to charge or going to need to spend a lot of battery on something, I’ll charge it fully.
I don’t know much about lithium iron phosphate batteries other than that they typically have longer lifespans and better fire safety compared to lithium ion batteries, but it doesn’t mean they should be abused beyond the specs recommended. Are you doing a solar & battery installation? If you’re DIYing it, make sure to do a lot of research about getting a good BMS and installing everything correctly so you don’t burn your house down by accident.
Thank you for the reply. Yes I am off griding running off solar just got a bluetti eb3a to manage panel power since I’ve never done any solar before and didn’t want to mess things up. it seems pretty smart.
I just googled it, it seems like it is an all in one system. I assumed you were talking about buying battery cells and designing your own system, but since you have a self contained system (which already obviously has a BMS), you can ignore the last paragraph I wrote previously.
Hope it serves you well.
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 this is an Android phone, go install Accubattery
Too bad that app has 7 trackers embedded and access to the ad ID :/
The permissions look fairly reasonable to me considering it needs to run at startup and monitor other apps, and the Pro upgrade is an embedded option that would need connectivity.
I just firewall it anyway, but that requires root.
IIRC you can change your ad ID any time but that’s kinda outside the scope here.
Absolute best is keeping the battery plugged at 60%
Some phones have “store mode” that caps battery charge at this level and its used primarly by stores to keep one phone always plugged and turned on for display.
If you cant do that then 80 to 20 is second best thing. Keeping it at 100% is the worst.
This is about lithium ion batteries, no idea what best practices are for lifepo4
80/20
Many modern devices have algoeithms to limit charge as well as regulate charge speeds as well.
This is the dilema since we use lithium batteries. And if it was truth we would be certain of it.
I believe that there is a difference, but I think it is in the range of few percents of capacity lost per year, which means you will be using 60% of the capacity. That’s capacity you get after 10+ years of use.
We all know batteries don’t last that long anyway.
All that said I do keep laptop on 80% ¯_(ツ)_/¯
since I rarely use it on battery.
