[Thanks to Bruce]
How to prolong lithium-based batteries, article. I've been promoting occasional full discharges to keep the "elasticity" of your gadget's battery. But it seems the advice is different when we're talking about a lithium-based battery, which are becoming common. They prefer partial discharges rather than full ones.
But still:
Although lithium-ion is memory-free in terms of performance deterioration, batteries with fuel gauges exhibit what engineers refer to as "digital memory". Here is the reason: Short discharges with subsequent recharges do not provide the periodic calibration needed to synchronize the fuel gauge with the battery's state-of-charge. A deliberate full discharge and recharge every 30 charges corrects this problem.
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2 comments:
Generally, I think it's OK to just use Lithium batteries and not worry about calibration.
You are not making Lithium batteries work better by doing a major discharge. You are only making the reporting of their charge more accurate. It doesn't help the actual performance of the battery itself.
If you usually don't let your battery run down below 50 percent before recharging, why should you care how accurate the reporting is? You will always have enough power anyway.
If you are a power user then you probably run the batteries nearly flat once a month just by accident in normal use, which takes care of the calibration.
I confess though, that once in a while I do deliberately let my phone and iPad run down to 25 percent or so. If I was going on a long trip and was unsure how often I could charge my phone and iPad, I might want to do a calibration a few weeks before I left.
And the calibration depends on the fuel gauge, some calibrate over a range of say 40%, others calibrate over a discharge from 100% to 6%, but not necessarily in one long session.
I've been led to understand li-ion doesn't have the crystallization you get in other chemistries.
It's a fascinating subject.
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