Had a quick question (hope this is the right section).
I’ve seen people automating the power supply to their tablets that are running a dashboard. Seems they turn the power supply on when it reaches XX percentage battery, and then off at 100%
I was just wondering, why not just leave the power adaptor on all of the time?
not charging the battery above 80% significantly lengthen the lifespan.
Not charging at all, so constantly keeping it 100% full is very bad for a battery.
There have been some cases where a device that is plugged in overheats and/or swells the battery, which can lead to a violent, unplanned disassembly of the device. I suspect this is an attempt to avoid that possibility.
Reminds me of a conversation about lithium-ion batteries in a YouTube video.
The video discussed the history and safety innovations of these batteries over their lifetime from conception to today. One conversation was about videos and reports of dramatic battery failures. The engineer in the video pointed out that the intersection of 8+ billion cell phone cameras and billions of lithium-ion batteries makes the likelihood of failure seem higher than expected, when in reality it’s more likely what would be expected. It will always be a non-zero number.
Personally, I’m not sure it’s something you need to put effort in preventing over other more likely dangers in your life.
Immense scale is making things we called “once in a billion” communications errors (meaning it will never happen or isn’t worth worrying about) in the 70’s force us to use new communication encoding techniques because they now happen 8 times a second for companies like Google or Meta.
I don’t toggle the power, but I think success depends on the device. I had an old, cheap Samsung phone plugged in (and charging constantly) for about two years before the battery started swelling (it never exploded). But I also had an iPad Air 2 (2014 vintage) charging constantly for close to four years and it’s still going strong. Anecdotally I suspect Apple devices may have better battery margin and/or management to maintain battery health. Some newer devices (including iPhones 15 and some laptops) now have a user-configurable option, so the internal BMS stops charging at, say, 80% even if power is applied so there’s no need for a smart plug anymore.
On my newer devices they are set from the factory to not charge past 80% so no doubt there is not much need on these devices. The older ones not charging above 80% will help.
The battery wear faster out if charging over 80%.
Charging over 80% is getting the last few passager in a public transport bus.
Not all the passager move around to make room and fill out the free spots further in.
The same is true for the electrons and it becomes a fight that affects the battery long term.
On top of that the power handling in the tablets are often set to stay at full charge, so its usage time is as good as it gets, but that means it might recharge to full again already when it hits 97% percent, putting even more load in the critical range.
The best way is to run it down to 20% and then charge it to 80% and so on.