How to charge a cell phone battery part 1

 How to charge a cell phone battery part 1

I’ve been curious about the proper way to charge and discharge my cell phone battery. I looked through some of the articles on BatteryUniversity.com. “How to Service Cell Phone Batteries” sounded juicy, but turned out to be written for cell phone store managers. It still had interesting tidbits, though:

• One cell phone provider (not specified) receives aprox. 10,000 returns per month because of battery complaints. For expediency, a new battery is provided on the spot.

• Of returned cell phone with battery complaints, 80 - 90% have nothing wrong with the battery, or can easily be restored with a battery analyzer. (The article implies that many cell phone stores have an analyzer.)

• The remaining 10 - 20% can be returned to working condition with a more involved set of steps on the battery analyzer. A very small percentage are actually bad.

• The fault often lies in the original charger that was packaged with the phone, not the battery.

• A common cause of failure is “coffee submersion”.

My own comment: As well as coffee, I also heard from another news source that 20% of all cell phones get dropped into a toilet. When I got my degree in photography; I was taught that if a camera is dropped in salt water, to immediately submerge it in fresh water, then allow it to dry. The same should apply to a wet cell phone: get the offending liquid off with fresh water, then allow it to dry. (The device should be turned off as quickly as possible.) The only time I’ve dropped an electronic item into liquid was a light meter into a mountain stream. It dried for 3 days, then worked fine.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the right way to charge and use cell phone batteries.

In the the BatteryUniversity.com article “All About Chargers”, I picked up some more tidbits.

(Note: The vast majority of cell phones have Li-ion batteries, so that’s what this article is about.)

* It’s possible to put your battery to sleep. This is bad. If you fully discharge your battery, then set it on a shelf for a week or more (who would do this?), it can drain a little bit more, and reach a protection circuit cut-off point. From here, the battery will play dead. The article says to take your “dead” battery to the cell phone store, where the specialized charger they have will wake it up again.

Does a battery analyzer exist? I had to find out - I called my local cell phone store. They’ve never heard of this specialized charger.

* Although often normal for other batteries, a Li-ion battery should never get warm during charging. A Li-ion battery may be left connected to its charger for up to week, because after charging, the charger has turned off anyway. If it does warm up, either the battery or the charger is bad.

My opinion: If you have a friend with the same phone, you can try swapping the battery, then the charger to determine the culprit. Once determined, replace the problem. If you don’t have easy access to the same phone, you can order a battery and a charger from a satisfaction guaranteed place like Batteries4Less.com

Many have asked if there’s a pattern of charging a new battery which will help it last longer. I haven’t found anything yet on BatteryUniversity.com which addresses this directly. Batteries4Less.com says that the first several times the phone is used, the battery should be used down to 25 - 30% before recharging. BatteryUniversity.com did say not to fully discharge a Li-ion battery.





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About the Author -
Douglas Hooper is a professional photographer with over 30 years experience. His specialties are commercial product photography, and weddings. His passion is fine art photography. He’s now based in California’s Sierra Foothills in the Grass Valley/Nevada City area. Douglas is doing an Internet marketing internship at Batteries4Less.com.