If you use fast wired charging, which most phones do, you're causing significant wear to the battery. With daily fast charging, I've seen phones chew through their battery in under a year.
Conversely, the rather slow charge rate of wireless helps extend battery life quite a lot. This is why I never use fast charging, avoid wired charging in general, and limit my battery to 85% max charge. It's been three or four years and my battery is still at ~80% health.
Which is worse, wasting a small amount of power or trashing your phone's battery in a year or two? One has significantly higher monetary and environmental costs.
Besides all that, wired charging is not nearly as efficient as you think. The charge circuitry in your phone is optimistically 80-90%. The wall adapter can be anywhere from 50 to 90%, and scales pretty closely to how much you paid for it. Efficiency also goes down with faster charge rates.
I design switching converters and lithium charge circuits for my job. They're pretty great, but not nearly as good as you'd think.
>This is why I never use fast charging, avoid wired charging in general
Wireless charging isn't a silver bullet either. It generates tons of waste heat, which is also bad for batteries. I'm also not sure why you're so against wired charging, especially since you have to go out of your way and pay a premium for fast charge capable chargers. If you buy a bog standard 5W/10W charger, you're not fast charging. If you plug your phone into your computer, you're likely getting slow charging (0.5A to 1A).
I'm not against wired charging per se, I just think wireless is better.
I use an extremely old wireless charging stand that doesn't even hit 500mA. It gets warm, but not hot. It takes all damn night to charge which suits me just fine.
That said, I agree with you, which is why I've explicitly disabled fast wireless charging. The heat is almost as bad as excessive charge current. Though both heat and excessive current together is much worse than either individually. Which is exactly what you get with super fast charging modes, and why I disable those modes.
Generally, phones ship with at least a 20W charger these days. It's fine, probably.
Really my whole deal here is that my phone has a non-replacable battery. Paying someone to crack it open and replace the battery would cost a lot more than I'm willing to pay. My goal is to preserve the battery for as long as I can so I don't have to trash the whole phone.
Ultimately, this is a decision made for myself based on my own professional experience with lithium batteries and associated electronics. I definitely wouldn't recommend everyone do everything I'm doing; it is a bit excessive. But that's just how I like to do things.
Yeah I disable all the fast charging modes too. Except when I really need them for a quick top-up. I think it's great to have the capability when needed but not something to use every day.
>go out of your way and pay a premium for fast charge capable chargers
If you're on the road and using your laptop's USB-C charger to charge your phone then it'll easily supply enough power for the fastest charge mode of any phone.
Yeah, it could supply 60W or even more. But it won't, because most people who care about this stuff set both the charging rate limit and max battery percentage limit in the phone's settings and don't worry about it anymore.
> Besides all that, wired charging is not nearly as efficient as you think. The charge circuitry in your phone is optimistically 80-90%. The wall adapter can be anywhere from 50 to 90%, and scales pretty closely to how much you paid for it. Efficiency also goes down with faster charge rates.
The costs of wireless are on top of all of the costs of wired. You're not getting away from battery management just because you're using the air as a very inefficient cable.
> If you use fast wired charging, which most phones do, you're causing significant wear to the battery.
I don't know about other Android phones, but Google's Pixel line of phones will do a slow charge overnight and time the top off to be in line with your morning alarm. So, my thought is that effort is being made here to extend battery life by specifically not fast charging overnight.
That's a pretty good feature and would significantly decrease battery wear. I'm actually surprised it's implemented in the Pixel, it should be a core feature of Android
In my experience, the best battery care measure is to get a phone with a good battery...
I bought a Huawei P30 Pro in early 2019, never took care of preserving the battery, always used fast charging (which is very fast in that phone, 40 W). 4 years later, the battery is still going strong (now the phone belongs to my wife).
On the other hand, I bought a Pixel 6 Pro in early 2021. From the beginning, I saw that the battery barely lasted a day of heavy usage, so I was more careful (trying to never get below 20%, deactivating 5G, etc.), plus the phone charges slower (around 20 W, I think) and has built-in charge planning to charge slower overnight. Even with all that, two years later, the battery is absolute crap. If I'm going to use the phone frequently (e.g. when travelling) I need an external battery to last though the day.
Conversely, the rather slow charge rate of wireless helps extend battery life quite a lot. This is why I never use fast charging, avoid wired charging in general, and limit my battery to 85% max charge. It's been three or four years and my battery is still at ~80% health.
Which is worse, wasting a small amount of power or trashing your phone's battery in a year or two? One has significantly higher monetary and environmental costs.
Besides all that, wired charging is not nearly as efficient as you think. The charge circuitry in your phone is optimistically 80-90%. The wall adapter can be anywhere from 50 to 90%, and scales pretty closely to how much you paid for it. Efficiency also goes down with faster charge rates.
I design switching converters and lithium charge circuits for my job. They're pretty great, but not nearly as good as you'd think.