Everyone reading this (and most who aren’t!) will be all too aware of the frustrations of battery life. But did you know there are things you can do to actually prolong the life and quality of your lithium batteries?

What Causes Lithium-ion to degrade?

Lithium-ion batteries work on ion movement between the internal positive and negative electrodes.

In theory, this should work forever but various environmental factors, like temperature and charging speeds, will decrease performance over time. The performance degradation is typically first observed by the user as degraded capacity; a device will appear to deplete battery charge faster and will need recharging more often, being less able to hold its charge for long periods of time.

What can users do to prolong their batteries?

Environmental conditions, not cycling alone, predominantly govern the longevity of lithium-ion batteries.

Lithium-ion suffers from stress when exposed to heat, and a battery dwelling above 30°C (86°F) is considered an elevated temperature. Exposing the battery to heat whilst charging or dwelling at a high state of charge for an extended time can be more stressful. Extremely low temperatures can also have a detrimental effect on battery life.

Worsening the situation is charging a battery at high rates of charge, which induce self-heating through its internal impedance.

Charging at a lower rate of charge reduces the self-heating effect within batteries, allowing heat to dissipate, which lowers battery heating and stress. When the use case of a device allows a lower rate of charge can be beneficial to the battery’s longevity.
Allowing a device to spend prolonged periods of time in extremes of charge-state (100% or 0%) will also, over time, deplete the longevity of the battery. Once a device does reach 100% it’s also best to unplug it as soon as possible.

Why bother?

For one thing, you want to get the maximum performance, efficiency and lifespan from your batteries. All batteries have an environmental impact so even very small incremental improvements to battery life will be a positive, environmentally speaking.

Looking after batteries and following these tips to increase lithium battery longevity will reduce time between device upgrades, charges and prolong use – so it really is a win all round. For businesses using devices day-to-day the cost implication and user experience are really significant, so it’s very much worthwhile instilling good practice across your workforce and device management teams. In a nutshell - the longer your batteries last, the better it is for your budget, as well as the environment.

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