Does Fast Charging ACTUALLY Run Your Battery in 2022

 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 backup 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.

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.