This is surely a very frequent question for most of the Smartphone owners. Smartphones nowadays are an essential part of one's life and for the same reason, we want it to be alive with us all of the time. But unfortunately battery doesn't allow it. We use Smartphones throughout the day and the only time we get to charge it, is the night while we go to sleep. Therefore we keep the Smartphone for charging when we go to sleep expecting to wake up with a 100% charge. But the common question is "Should/Can we charge our smartphones overnight?". Well the shorter answer is "Yes, you can!".
Heat: The Charge Killer
First of all let us know about the batteries.
There are two kinds of batteries being used in smartphones. One is 'Nickel' and the other is 'Lithium' made. The latter one being the latest. Nickel made batteries had a tendency to have a "cyclic memory". If they weren’t given full charges in between cycles, they would 'forget' their full capacity and remember the level of charge to which they were last charged as being the maximum capacity. this made researchers to develop Lithium batteries. These are smarter and effiecient than the Nickel made. Lithium made have played a major role in the smartphone revolution because they’re capable of holding a lot of power while remaining fairly compact, which allowed mobile phones to become increasingly small and thin. The only major drawback was its 'Temperature sensitivity".
Now we get to the most important threat to LI-ion or Li-polymer battery, which is heat. Batteries dislike cold just about as much as they dislike the heat, but the "heat is more relevant when it comes to leaving your device plugged into its charger overnight."
A Lithium made battery warms up as it charges. As it gets warmer, it charges more faster. But since a battery can’t hold more than its capacity, after reaching full capacity, the battery releases the excess charge by giving it off as heat. This is where Overnight charging becomes a problem to a battery that has no way to manage the incoming current after reaching its capacity but heating.
But luckily, we have a solution for this problem.
Smartphones use the Battery power Smartly.
Batteries being used in today's smartphone generation is almost similar to the older ones. but softwares that handle the batteries have improved enormously.
They have become much much smarter than the previous ones which makes our worries about Overnight charging vanish.
Thus, we get the answer to the question "Can I keep my smartphone for charging overnight?". The answer is "Sure, why not?"
As it was mentioned earlier, The major threat to a battery while overnight charging is "The Heat".
"Smartphones nowadays can stop charging when the battery has reached its full capacity and start using the connected power source as its primary power source", allowing you to wake up with a fully-charged battery while your phone remains powered on through the night, of course with no heating issue.
Pretty awesome isn't it?
Well, it doesn't assure no harm to your battery with this practice. But surely there is no harm from Heating. You can surely keep your device for overnight charging.
Here's a video from Android Authority about the same issue
Some tips for great battery life:
- On a complete charge cycle, Lithium made battery's maximum charge holding capacity gets decreased. So always try not to let the complete charge cycle get over. Which means always try to maintain your battery level above 30-40%. charge the device before battery level goes below 30%.
- If your device supports fast charging, try not to use it every time. Use it only when necessary. Because fast charge results in heating of the battery which may effect the Battery life span.
- Its true that Lithium batteries overcame the "Capacity forgetting" issue which was in Nickel batteries. But sometimes, the charge determining function in your smartphone(which indicates the battery percentage) may show unnecessary values. In this case, just use the phone till it dies, and then charge it to full capacity. This should possibly solve the issue.
Conclusion:
Overnight charging isn't a issue to battery's life span in the present generation since softwares which handle the battery have improved. Once battery has reached the full capacity, they start to use the connected power supply as the power source for the device and keep the fully charged battery idle until power supply is disconnected. This eliminates the heating issue and thus cause no harm to battery. You can keep your smartphone for charging and sleep peacefully here on.
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