Do Portable Battery Chargers Ruin the Battery Life of Your Phone?

Time:2017-09-13 Views:194

Do Portable Battery Chargers Ruin the Battery Life of Your Phone?

With how much people use their phones on a day-to-day basis, it is increasingly important to keep your cell phone battery charged. While scientists are accidentally creating batteries that can last a lifetime, the rest of us still need to charge our phones once a day.

In a perfect world, we’d always be near a wall outlet to charge our phones, but that isn’t the case. As a result, many of us use a portable battery charger to keep our phones and devices topped up. However, a quick browse through some forums show a handful of commentators expressing doubt about portable chargers. Some even question if portable chargers can damage our phone’s battery life. Are they right?

Most cell phones require a wall charger or a portable charger that offers an output voltage of around 5V. However, if you’ve ever trawled through questionable eBay listings or spent time in a market with goods of dubious quality, you may have encountered knockoff portable chargers. These could potentially deliver a voltage higher or lower than what your phone requires. Charging with the wrong voltage can cause real damage to your phone’s battery. Perhaps that’s why some commentators have found that their battery was damaged.

On the other hand a good quality portable charger from a reputable company, combined with a suitable charging cable, should bring no issues whatsoever, especially if the voltage output matches your phone’s. In addition to that, quality portable battery chargers are efficient and will protect your device from overcharging, overheating, over-current and over-voltage. While this doesn’t mean you need to leave them plugged in all the time, it does mean that even if your phone is plugged in once charged, these portable chargers aren’t overcharging your device or impacting battery performance.

Why Do Charge Cycles Affect Battery Performance?

A weaker battery is also the result of the number of battery charge cycles. In general, a typical lithium battery will have at least 500 full charge cycles. Here’s how it works: Your cell phone battery loses its charge because of a chemical reaction that slowly occurs as you charge your device. Repeated charges will eventually render your device not being able to get a full charge. So if you fully charge every day for a year and a half, your battery will exceed 500 charge cycles and will noticeably perform worse. Thankfully there are a few phones that allow you to replace your battery if you are dealing with this issue.

What Can I Do?

In order to combat this common problem of batteries losing life, you can ensure to keep your phone away from physical damage and extreme temperatures on both ends of the spectrum. Both of these contribute to rapid battery life loss in cell phones. You can also learn why your cell phone battery loses its charge over time and avoid things that damage the battery.

In conclusion, no, charging your cell phone with a portable battery charger will not damage or affect the battery life. Of course you should be wary of using extremely cheap or knockoff models, and always be sure to look at the voltage of a portable battery charger before you buy it. Happy charging.
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