How to charge your devices the right way

Charge and charge again.

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Without a battery, your expensive laptop or smartphone becomes a hunk of dead electronics. And these rechargeable powerhouses have a finite lifespan: Over time, they will start losing power faster and taking longer to charge.

To extend the battery's useful life for as long as possible, you need to take care of your device properly. That means adopting good charging habits and taking care with battery storage. Here's what you need to know.

The science of lithium-ion batteries
The rechargeable batteries used by today's smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other devices all use a technology called lithium-ion. As you might expect, they contain...lithium ions. As Popular Science explained in our look at Tesla's Powerwall battey:

When the battery is charging, positively-charged lithium ions move from one electrode, called the cathode, to the other, known as the anode, through an electrolyte solution in the battery cell. That causes electrons to concentrate on the anode, at the negative side. When the battery is discharged, the reverse happens. As for those electrons, they move through circuits that are external to the battery, providing juice.

Those electrons actually supply the energy for your smartphone or tablet—or in the case of Tesla, your entire home.

Over the years, scientists have tweaked the formula of the chemical mix inside lithium-ion batteries to try and get them to last longer, charge faster, and work more efficiently. Despite their tinkering, lithium-ion batteries still have a set lifetime. Why?

The cycle of battery charging and discharging and recharging can only repeat a certain number of times: Due to the nature of the chemical reactions happening at the anode and cathode, thin layers of insulating atoms form, obstructing the electrodes' effectiveness. The limit varies, but most rechargables will last two or three years, so if you've noticed battery life dropping on an old smartphone or laptop, you can blame atomic buildup.

Charging and recharging

So how do you make your lithium-ion battery last as long as possible? You may have heard you need to do a full charge and discharge when your device is right out of the box—but this doesn't really matter on modern batteries. What matters most is how you charge your phone or laptop after you've started using it.

Read More at
https://www.popsci.com/charge-batteries-right#page-3