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Device Repair Ethics & Battery Preservation Facts

Shame on Apple & Samsung & LG & Microsoft & Tesla & other greedy selfish anti-consumer companies who betray their customers by sealing in batteries or making parts proprietary & unavailable or doing other unethical & immoral things to prevent customers from fixing or repair their stuff for a reasonable price. 

When you buy & own something, its your personal property & you are free to do whatever you want with it within reason while obeying laws & social conventions. If thats your phone or smartphone or smartwatch or tablet or laptop or appliance or car or home or any other personal property like clothing & shoes. You are free to get your thing fixed or repaired or worked on by anyone you deem fit to do so. 

Designed Obsolescence & Life Cycle Analytics

Your lithium ion powered device did not come wrapped in a warning sticker telling you that regularly charging to 100% will increased the degradation rate or loss of capacity of the battery, leading to progressively worse runtime if your park it on the charger all night & overcharge it. The battery needed for the device to work, be that a car or a smartphone or any mobile electronics. The #1 thing to fail first on most portable consumer electronics, the battery! Manufactures are aware of this so they do things like sealing the batteries inside so they are not user replaceable. Most people do not have the special tools, skills or parts to take their consumer electronics apart to replace the sealed internal battery! 

Designed To Fail Early

Many appliances & TV's & other COTS or consumer off the shelf technology are designed to fail just after the warranty ends. LG smartphones for example have a statically significant failure rate just beyond the 1 year mark, one of the most unreliable smartphones you can buy made by LG! I have been fixing & repairing smartphones professionally for more than 5 years & know who the worst offenders are. Apple at least makes battery changes plausibly feasible with adhesive pull tabs & the same penta-lobe screws used for 9 generations of iPhones. 

Samsung Battery Glue Debacle & Overcharging Scam

Samsung does this horrendous means spirited design where they overuse battery adhesive & have a cutout in the mid frame behind the battery so that if you stick a removal tool just a few mm too far under the battery to liberate it from the adhesive your dangerously close to snapping the OLED screen from behind - essentially Samsung boobytrapped the battery to make it extremely hard to change & such that you risk breaking the screen while changing the battery in a logical or coherent way given the vast amount of adhesive used to secure the battery, which is completely overkill & evidence that 

Top 10% between 90 & 100 & bottom 10% between 10% & 0% Damage the Battery

Samsung deliberately designed their phones to make it very hard to remove the battery, full well knowing that most people are going to park the phone on the charger all night & unwittingly damaged the LIPO battery with overcharging, which causes the lithium ions to irreversible stick to the carbon anode materials, such that they are lost, causing a loss of battery capacity that progressively degrades the runtime every time the phone charged to 100%. Worse, they know how to program the charging system in the phone to stop charging at 4.11 vdc to greatly enhance the life of the battery to 5X longer than if the battery charged to 4.26vdc or worse to 4.35. Apple also guilty of overcharging the batteries with a high voltage that degrade the anode faster. Draining to below 10% damages the cathode by causing irreversible insertion or intercalation of lithium ions into the lithium cobalt / nickel / aluminum cathode materials. 

30-80% Long Life Lithium Ion Charging / Think 30 minutes / Never all night long // 

If you charge your lithium ion batteries between 30-80% with short 10-40 min bursts, the battery can last unto 10X longer both in terms of calendar life & cycle life. Shallow cycling protects the anode & cathode from lithium insertion damaged caused by fully charging repeatedly & deeply draining to zero repeatedly. This applies to nearly all common portable consumer electronics that are battery powered! Electric cars like the Nissan Leaf & Tesla Model 3 are also subject to battery damage if the battery regularly charged to 100% or drained to 0% state of charge. The issue stems from lithium ions lost from the battery because they get stuck in the anode & cathode materials during full or deep discharge states. The science of lithium ion loss from the electrolyte into the anode & cathode perfectly clear & been known since Sony developed & started producing lithium ion batteries back in 1991! Why the diffusion of this knowledge not widespread? IDK ? 

Battery Failure Mode Designed into the Charge Controller

People are focused on other things other than how to maximizing the useful life of their smartphone battery or EV battery. I am only telling you what is empirically true, factual, based on the chemistry & physics of how the lithium ion battery works. I know there are many chemistries of lithium ion, more than 12, but they are all damaged by fully charging & draining to 0 / some more than others. Speaking of which a lithium titanate battery can last 25 years & 50,000 cycles because its the most durable or longest lasting, but with a nominal voltage of 2.4vdc, not 3.6vdc, using it means manufacturers would need to include a 2 cell (2S) battery of 4.8v nominal voltage, which complicates the charging system.

SLI 12v Vehicle Batteries 100% Charging with Maintainer or Automatic Charger for Longer Life 

Lead Acid 12v car starting lighting & ignition batteries last longer if they are kept 100% charged as doing so keeps the acid from sulfating the anode & cathode, lead & lead oxide respectively. This has been widely known for 162 year, yet most people have no idea why the new car they parked & did not drive for 6 months during COVID19 2020 ended up with a dead battery. Again, people are focused on other things than how to get long life out of their car battery. Cars must be driven 3 hours per week for the charging system, alternator, to keep the SLA battery charged. A parked vehicle with an SLA battery should be connected to a battery tender or automatic battery charger to enhance the life of its battery. Most vehicles, including popular EV's, still have a 12v lead acid battery that must be kept fully charged in order for the battery to last 5 years. People who park their motorcycle or RV or ATV are buying batteries every year because they don't use them daily & the batteries self discharge in storage if they are not on a tender or automatic charger. 162 years is a long time for people not to get the message about keeping lead acid batteries, especially given the worldwide popularity of vehicles of all kinds with 12v SLA batteries. 

Nickle Metal Hydride 30-80% Long Life Charging Trick (Thanks Toyota) 

NiMH also lasts 50x longer if you keep them partially charged. I believe this chemistry came out in the mid 1970's after its invention by Stan Ovshinski & his lovely wife Iris. Toyota & Panasonic use the NiMH in hybrid electric cars like the Prius, where the computer keeps the average charge state around 60% & starts charging when the battery around 30% & stops charging when the battery around 80%- the internal research going back to 1994 at Toyota of Japan showed how to enhance the life of the hybrid NIMH battery packs by keeping them 30-80% charged. 

Nickel Cadmium Batteries like Fully Discharging & Stored Discharged (odd) Fully Cycling 

NiCD likes to be fully charged then fully drained & stored discharged, then fully charged & drained & stored discharge. NiCD can last unto 23 years if its stored discharged & fully charged before use. This chemistry about 60 years old. Some people with power tools charge the battery, put the battery in their tool, use the tool, then store it, remove it from storage & use the tool then store it discharged. Before their next project, night before or morning of, they fully charge the battery. I call these people the accidental winners because that charging regime makes the NiCd battery last the longest! This is also why we never saw large volume production of NiCD electric cars; you would have to drive them until they had 0 range left & then use a very powerful charger like 800kw to fully charge the battery before driving again -- not practical. One notable example where liquid NiCd really widely used in light small aircraft where the charge controller system, inspired by CADEX research applied, makes the NiCd battery last a lot longer than a heavier lower performance PbAcid battery. 

Make Your Batteries Last Longer Information :) 

I wrote the above to help you get longer life out of your batteries :) Blessings & warm regards! I got a lot of this information by researching the Toyota Prius before I bought the first of our two models back in 2005. Battery University online & writings of Isidor Buchanan, founder of CADEX, also informed a lot of what I shared about how to get longer life out of common rechargeable batteries! 


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