And don’t let it discharge below 20%.
One of the things that still surprises a lot of people is that charging a battery to 100% is not a good thing. It really is not. Charging your battery to 100% continuously damages the battery. Worse, leaving the phone on the charger after it has reached 100% damages it even more.
Why?
A phone battery comes under a lot of stress when it is fully charged. It also comes under a lot of stress when it is empty.
In simple terms, the battery has to do a lot of work to get it charged to 100%. It also has to do a lot of work to charge if it goes all the way to 0%.
This extra amount of work reduces the lifespan of a battery. Now since batteries nowadays are not easily removable, if a battery’s lifespan has been reduced, it means generally the phone’s lifespan also reduces.
Recommendation
The best charge range is between 20% and 90% battery full. This means it is a very bad idea to leave your phone on the charger overnight. – the battery will charge to 100% and then it will keep charging every time it loses just a bit of charge. It will continuously do this the whole night damaging the battery significantly.
The best solution is to buy a power bank which you connect to your phone when you see it going down to 20%, and then leave it charging to around 80% or 90% power.
Recent Technology
New technology in some recent phones is helping by managing this process of charging under 100%.
Smartphones like the iPhone 14, Samsung Galaxy S23 and Google Pixel 7 for example will only charge to about 80% if you leave them connected through the night, and will quickly charge the rest just before you wake up.
But most phones in use in Africa, don’t really have this smart technology yet, so you have to manage the charging yourself.