Does Fast Charging ACTUALLY Ruin Your Battery?

okay so it seems like every few months a new company someone comes out with the new fastest ever charging smartphone like years ago the flagship iphone was charging at five watts and that was fairly standard it would take about two and a half hours to charge the phone from zero to a hundred then when the pixel one came out that was super fast charging at 18 watts then soon the iphone bumped up to 20. then you might remember one plus beat out everybody for a couple years with 30 watts but soon we had 45 65 80. now today right now this xiaomi 12 pro ships with this 120 watt charger this you could you can buy this right now today it charges the whole phone from zero to 100 in 17 minutes and then just a few weeks ago oppo demoed this it's not on a real smartphone yet but it would charge a theoretical 240 watts which would go from zero to a hundred in nine minutes that's pretty ridiculous and then as you may have noticed like i have pretty much any time one of these demos gets posted somewhere universally the comments across the board are like i don't want that on my phone that definitely is going to overheat good luck plugging that in for more than five minutes before it explodes people across the board are universally convinced that there is no way that this can be good for your smartphone's battery which got me thinking if this is true then why would these companies keep doing this is fast charging actually ruining your battery so i dove into it i just go straight in plenty of google searches plenty of articles read plenty of people talk to and plenty of hot takes out there but this is what i found so batteries have improved in their chemistry over time but right now all phones use lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries and the way they work is they have a positive side and a negative side and the lithium ions flow from the negative to the positive side through a liquid electrolyte solution and as they flow energy is released into the circuit that's what's keeping the phone powered by the battery when that flow is over though the battery has reached zero percent and is dead so charging the battery back up is moving those ions back through from the positive to the negative side through that electrolyte solution so the first thing to know about charging a battery is batteries are kind of like a sponge like they they absorb the most energy when they have the least in them and then as they get closer and closer to full they can't absorb quite as efficiently and then there is some excess lost with a sponge it's just extra water passing through with a battery that's just excess heat and so what that looks like is charging actually happens on a curve those numbers that you keep seeing with the 100 watts and 150 watt fast charging that's not the constant rate of charging that's just the peak the maximum that they're capable of but that's typically only briefly the actual rate so a 65 watt fast charger for example will typically only hit 65 watts for the first few minutes pretty early on in the charge from low battery and then taper off and basically only trickle charge at a lower wattage after around 80 and you can actually view that if you get one of these incredibly nerdy cables with the display on it that lets you see exactly how much power your phone is accepting while you're charging i'll link one of them below the like button but then the second thing to know is batteries do degrade over time the iphone as you've probably seen lets you literally visualize it shows you the percentage so if you go to settings and battery and battery health you can see your iphone's degradation rating as a number from 1 to 100 so this 13 pro i've been using is still good for 97 of the capacity it had when i got it five months ago so why does it go down is the real question we're trying to answer and turns out there are several things that degrade batteries i mean these are they're picky little things they're very energy dense little storage units they don't like being at 100 exactly they don't like being at zero percent and they do naturally degrade over time as they go through charge cycles and the ions pass through that electrolyte solution over and over again slowly breaking it down this is totally natural and can't really be avoided as you charge the phone more and more but the number one factor that damages batteries that degrades them faster than normal but ruins your battery is heat so the ions are moving through that electrolyte a lot but you can think of the electrolyte basically like salts so they can be pretty sensitive to changes in heat they can actually crystallize and clog up the anodes and cathodes which stops them from being able to store the lithium ions and like i mentioned earlier when the battery isn't in the optimal state of charge it's less efficient and that extra runoff energy manifests as heat the heat is no good so clearly the goal here is to minimize any excess heat around that battery which would damage it faster than normal now the thing is generally the more wattage the more power you're pumping into this battery the more heat it's going to generate so it sounds like this extra fast charging is clearly bad for your phone it's more heat generated and it's bad degradation but that's not something these companies aren't thinking about so over the years a bunch of these different smartphone companies have basically been working on trying to figure out how to charge these phones as fast as possible without generating any extra heat like if you look at just xiaomi's page for their fast charging alone there's tons of charts and graphs and claims about what they're doing to get around this so one new advancement came from one plus when they dropped that warp charge 30t charger it was kind of interesting and a little confusing maybe that we had warp charge 30 and warp charge 30t and both were 30 watts but 30t was faster but this is because with 30t the power management got handled in the brick instead of in the phone so there was more heat produced by the brick in the wall instead of on the phone near the battery so oneplus could put the same amount of power into the phone but for a longer period of time without heating it up as much and so the charging curve could be improved like this so that's a nice step the downside there is we're now we're getting larger power bricks but that's a bit of a trade-off people are willing to make i guess but then another way we've seen a bunch of companies jump on especially lately is with something called parallel charging so basically instead of putting a ton of power into a single battery they actually split up the battery into two cells next to each other and then add power management hardware to split the incoming power this is a simple but brilliant way to get faster charging times without a ton of heat imagine instead of trying to pump 50 watts into a single 5000 milliamp hour battery just doing 25 watts into two batteries of half the size that's going to generate way less heat it's only 25 watts but combined when you draw the curves you can achieve the equivalent of 50 watt charging and you get to put 50 watts on the box but it's with way less heat but again there's a downside to this method too which is a slightly smaller overall battery capacity because if you take the same internal volume of two batteries instead of one that means there's more space taken up by the boundary between the batteries and the housing and that charging management hardware i mentioned so you'll often end up with slightly smaller overall batteries if they're split like this and then of course something we've seen in just about every new phone coming out which doesn't really have a downside is just adding more cooling hardware onto the phone itself sometimes that's heat shields and vapor chambers sometimes it's a whole fan but specifically we're trying to get the parts inside from getting too hot it feels like every smartphone announcement for the past two to three years has some sort of section about cooling especially gaming phones you're of course cooling the system on a chip too but the better the cooling system overall the more power you can put into the phone without it getting too hot so the real question is is it working like is it is it that simple you can just as long as you keep the phone cool enough you can put as much power into it as you want well there are the downsides i mentioned earlier with the larger brick and maybe the phone's got to be thicker with more cooling and has a smaller capacity battery but the question we're trying to ask is what counts as ruining your battery that's a simple one and it turns out there's actually an industry standard for this so from the research i've done and the people at these companies i've talked to that generally accepted target goal is 80 battery health after 800 charges so let's say you charge your phone roughly once a day that'll pan out to about two years so 80 charge after two years so this iphone now that i'm at 97 after about five months is on track to be at roughly 85 after two years which that's pretty good that's above the industry standard officially not being ruined now for all these super fast chargers that are new well it's tough because they're new so they've just come out and we don't have long term data and it sucks that the only information i can use is just coming straight from those companies so i'm basically taking their word for it that yeah the fast charging doesn't ruin the phone over time but it's the best information we have and it is actually surprisingly impressive so from their test results xiaomi on their site say that their 120 watt charging tech is rated to maintain 80 battery health after 800 charge cycles apple on their site they don't have the fastest charging but they say 80 after just 500 charges but like i said it seems like they're outperforming their own claims hey under promise over deliver and then oppo and oneplus who've announced they'll have a 150 watt charging phone this year say that they've specifically stated it'll go 80 battery health after 1 600 cycles so that will outperform the industry standard which i guess means they have room to keep going up now don't get me wrong the trade-offs are very real not everybody wants a thicker phone or a larger power brick or a slightly smaller capacity battery but from where i'm sitting and from the test results that we can go by basically fast charging does not have to ruin your battery life and really the best part of that is just convenience on top of the fact that these companies are all actively still working on making this stuff better you might have heard about gallium nitride chargers there's a couple actually out there already in the market that allows the brick to actually be much smaller than the typical silicon charges we're all using now so you can do a 65 watt gallium nitride charger half the size and still put the same power into the phone but really what it comes down to these days is it's called a smartphone for a reason batteries these days are smart like modern phones all have tons of hardware and sensors inside the phone to help measure temperature and regulate charging so it's doing all kinds of stuff automatically and then the phones all will add a bunch of software features on top to help you actively maintain the battery to the nth degree plus you know phones like the rog phone 5 have pass-through charging so when you're plugged in and gaming which is typically not a good idea on a regular phone it can just power the system and it doesn't add charge to the battery at all so you're not putting extra stress and heat on the battery and it can maintain battery health for a lot longer the latest iphones and pixels too right now have a feature where if you plug in at night around the same time every night after a few days it learns when you wake up so instead of charging right to 100 when you plug it in it charges up to 80 then waits all the way until you're about to wake up maybe an hour before your alarm and then charges the rest of the way up to 100 so you wake up with a full battery but better health and pretty much any other phone with this super fast charging coming up is gonna have to have a suite of battery health options that you can mess with in the software to take your battery health protection to the next level so i don't know how fast these phones charging is gonna get in the next couple years inevitably it's just gonna keep getting better as companies work on it but what i can tell you is the best thing we can do for our phones is to just use them like normal and basically don't give them any extra reason to get hot you know leaving it in the dash of your car on a sunny day gaming while plugged in for long periods of time stuff like that if you can avoid your phone getting super hot you're doing the best thing you can for your battery and these smartphone companies all know that battery problems are bad news so if they're all doing their jobs then we should all be good fun fact the famous galaxy note 7 battery exploding issue as crazy as it was it wasn't actually due to fast charging or overheating it was actually just them with their battery supplier getting some dimensions wrong and some bending going on of the battery with the positive and negative sides up in the corners something to think about either way now you have the answer thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 3,751,582

Keywords: fast charging, fast charging explained, does fast charging hurt battery, is fast charging bad, MKBHD, ruin battery, battery life, hurt battery, bad for battery

Id: UpqaQR4ikig

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/KanevX05]

Good research but no testing whatsoever doesnt really help with this argument. Testing will seal the deal.

[u/kr731]

sounds like about what I expected I guess, don’t let it get too hot and you’re fine

[u/HGMIV926]

Betteridge's law of headlines:

an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older...It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.

[u/smartazz104]

So this almost 13 minute video could be summarised with either a yes or a no…

[u/ElvishJerricco]

Marques: Describes technology that not everyone understands in detail.

ITT: I already understand that in detail, this video could have just said yes or no, Marques is bad

[u/joyce_kap]

I slow charge overnight when I sleep and fast charge in car when I go to work

[u/MachDiamonds]

Eh totally anecdotal, but I slow charge my iPhone 13 most of the time using my windows PC(5V, 0.5A), and I don't leave my phone charging overnight anymore. I still fast charge my phone from time to time using a 65W USB-PB charger when I need it, but it's mostly slow charging and my battery capacity has barely changed since launch.

Imgur

[u/DanTheMan827]

If heat kills batteries, I suppose Qi charging isn’t a good idea then? Especially the MagSafe fast charging… those get extremely hot

[u/LegendAks]

He spoke a lot and didn't say anything meaningful. Just quoted the manufacturer's claims LoL