​ The Problem with Fast Chargers.

 

    I feel like every other day we see a new company boasting about how fast their new smartphone can charge. But what a lot of these companies don't tell you is that faster charging doesn't come for free.

How a Battery Works ?

    

     So very quickly the way your battery works is with two  poles. A negative and a positive. At the negative end you have a ton of free electrons. At the positive end you have less. So naturally those electrons just want to flow from the negative end to the positive and along the way they can power whatever components you put in their path. Once they've all flowed your battery is dead and that's where charging comes in.

How is charging done ?

   

     We can use electricity to basically push electrons back to the negative side creating that difference again. And so really all of us charger is pushing those electrons back faster. 

PROBLEMS WITH FAST CHARGING !

 

    But there are some problems with this.

 1. LESS CAPACITY

     

     For starters it means that in any given amount of space you actually get less battery capacity. In every battery between that positive and negative pole you also need a separator. It's there to make sure that the electrons don't just go straight from one side of the battery to the other and that they actually go through the circuit that you want them to.

 

    But see the faster you want to charge your battery, the thicker you have to make this separator to keep the battery stable and so the actual amount of usable battery you have, the battery density falls and if you want to charge ultra fast like a lot of these new phones are starting to do.

     

     You've got to take this a step further and also split the battery itself into two separate batteries which as you can probably guess waste even more space.This is why you pretty much never see ultra fast charging on anything but big phones. Because it takes up so much room. 

 

2. OVERHEATING

    Faster charging means faster electron movement. Generally speaking, it creates more heat and heat is not a battery's best friend. It can slowly and subtly change its physical structure. And will make its ability to hold charge fall over time. As a very rough estimate even if you kept your battery at 30 degrees Celsius you could expect to lose 20 percent of your battery capacity over a year. If you kept it at 40 degrees Celsius something like 40% could just disappear.

     This is why it's recommended that when your phone is charging  try to leave it alone. It's already going to be warm from the charging. Using it is only going to add to that. You might have seen some gaming phones recently which have USB- C ports positioned to be able to charge while gaming. I wouldn't do it. The only one exception is if you're going to use bypass charging which basically just forces your charger to power the components of your phone directly and not touch the battery. So your battery percentage wouldn't go up but it also wouldn't go down.

     I know ASUS has this on their ROG Phone 3 for example. Now side note this potential heat damage to the battery is also one of the many reasons that wireless charging kind of sucks. If you have the option to charge your phone with a 30W wired charger or a 30W wireless charger; the wired one is the way to go. Wireless will use up more energy and all that extra energy ends up has is heat. Also a lot of wireless chargers just promote themselves as a way to always keep yourself topped up at 100%.

    

     But actually this is the exact opposite of what's good for your phone. So you remember how the battery's full. We've basically pushed all of those electrons so that they're sitting in the negative pole and when your battery's empty they all are sitting in the positive. Well because of this both 100 and 0% charge are actually the two most imbalanced and high pressure states. To leave your battery in an ideal world you would constantly keep your battery at 50 percent where the free electrons are evenly distributed between both the negative and the positive.

    You might notice that when you next go get a new phone and power it on for the first time that the company you bought it from will have pre-charged it to something close to 50%. This is because they know that it's gonna be sitting on store shelves for a while and this is the way to get the least battery degradation.

3. DIMINISHING RETURNS

    Okay I kind of sidetracked there a little but that brings me on to the third issue with fast charging. The more powerful charging becomes the more you'll notice diminishing returns.
 

   

     Have you noticed how wherever manufacturers quote “How fast their charges are ! They'll always use the starting figure of how fast can it charge the first 50% for example”.

    Well that's because the wattage you get given is not actually the wattage that your phone will constantly be charging at. It's just the maximum it can reach and it'll reach that maximum somewhere during that early part of charging. As your battery starts to get full no matter how powerful your early charging is you have to drastically slow down to protect the battery's health. As a result a 60W charger is not twice as fast as a 30W charger and a 120W charger is not even close to twice as fast as a 60W charger.

    So fast charging does through some avenue or another mean you're going to get less battery as you use your phone. This is why some companies are integrating the option to slow charge even marketing it as a feature which I get it sounds crazy but hopefully now it makes a bit of sense. And if I had to guess I would say that this is also part of the reason why it took Apple so long to switch away from giving people these tiny little 5W charging bricks.

     Obviously providing these in the box will make them more money because they can then sell fast chargers separately but they also probably figured that because most of their users were fine. They didn't even really complain about the existing charging speeds. If they raised it all it was really going to reduce the longevity of their phones and because Apple makes so much money from software and services. They actually want people's iPhones which are the portals to that content to last as long as possible.

     This is why they provide software updates for five years solid on every model. It's why they even tried to slow down older iPhones to preserve their battery life. Apple wants its phones to last a long time. That's part of the reason why they haven't introduced 65W fast charging.

IS FAST CHARGING REALLY A PROBLEM ?

     I talk about fast charging and the problems it causes but I do just want to stress that it's not as bad as some people make it out to be. There are some redeeming factors.

1.ALL CHARGER DEGRADE

 For starters some people seem to have this idea that slow charging is good for your battery. I wish this was true but no matter how careful you are. No matter what charger you use your phone. After two years of charging and using the battery is not going to be able to last as long as it once did.

2.CHARGING BUFFERS

 

    Secondly fun fact: When your battery shows 100% it's not actually 100% full. Most manufacturers add a buffer into the smartphone so that even when it looks like it's full there is a little bit of extra capacity. So you don't completely fill it and damage it big time.
   

3. SMART POWER BRICKS

     But on top of that historically one of the problems with faster charging is that your device would charge up really  quickly but then continue to receive charge even when it's full and that can be damaging. But nowadays most manufacturers, they designed their included power bricks to be able to communicate with the phone. They were made for to actually cut the power when you hit 100% so over charging isn't really a problem either. 

 

4. OPTIMISED CHARGING

And the cherry on top is that a lot of phones now use something called Optimized Charging. 

     Here the battery will be prevented from hitting 100% until you actually need it to. So my iPhone for example has actually learned that I usually get up in the morning at 7 30 A.M. So when I go to bed and I stick it on charge it'll charge to 50% straight away and then throughout the night it'll just sit at that 50% figure. Right up until an hour before I wake up when it'll start filling itself. This is now a default feature on iOS 13 onwards and some android phones do it too.

 

     

     Before I wrote this article, I actually spent some time talking to Xiaomi who is a strong advocate of ultra fast charging speeds but also Asus who is a strong advocate of larger higher density batteries with a slower charging speed. The general consensus from everything I learned is that there is a sort of sweet spot. So in 2020, I'd say something like 30W charging is roughly what you need to give you speed but also keep the heat relatively low and allow you to have a large high density battery.

 

     Besides going down this route of having a high capacity battery will naturally speed up your charging anyways. Think of it like this if, I charge both a 3000mAh and a 5000mAh battery with the same power at the same time the 5000mAh will reach three thousand way before the 3000mAh will . Because of that whole concept of charge slowing down as a battery starts to fill up. 

 

    So when people say that they don't like the idea of fast charging I get it for the same reason that display resolution on phones hasn't really gone up in the last six years. For the same reason that we're not seeing 4k and 8k screen panels. There are strong diminishing and often negative returns to faster charging.

 

     I'm sure that over the years we'll be able to kind of shift that sweet spot further out with the introduction of new materials like Graphene but at the same time I think that idea of a sweet spot compromise between battery capacity and charging speed will stick around. 

 

    What is your thought about fast charger . Let me know you it in the comment section below. And as always I'll see you guys in the next one….

Peace Out !!!