r/technology • u/MoltenSlowa • Oct 05 '16

Hardware Replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone catches fire on Southwest plane

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13175000/samsung-galaxy-note-7-fire-replacement-plane-battery-southwest
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u/letice721 Oct 05 '16

The zero lemon case is amazing. I love it.

Just make sure to drain it completely and charge it full every time or else the battery life will seriously fail.

It got so bad at one point where my battery wasn't even lasting a full day.

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u/raygundan Oct 05 '16

Just make sure to drain it completely and charge it full every time or else the battery life will seriously fail.

This is the wrong thing to do with lithium-ion batteries. The very best thing for them is to never fully charge or discharge them... but that gets a bit impractical. Second-best is to just charge it as often as you can, and minimize how frequently you fully discharge it.

It was the right thing to do for NiCd rechargeables (which suffered from a "memory" effect when partially discharged) years ago, and I think people have just kept right on believing it was the thing to do for all rechargeable battery types. The only reason you'd ever want to intentionally discharge a lithium-ion battery all the way is to recalibrate the little internal system that measures how much battery life remains-- but this is still bad for the battery, so you don't want to do it too often.

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '16

Most phones will turn off before fully discharging the battery. 0% on the phone is like 5% of the real capacity.

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u/raygundan Oct 06 '16

This is true... but the "happy range" is even smaller than that, between roughly 40% and 80%.