Charging the battery from your cell phone at night: is it harmful? Easily explained

Many people put their cell phone in the socket overnight so that the battery can charge. However, this can be harmful to the battery - at least in some cases. Here we explain how to best charge your smartphone and what you should do at night.

Charging your smartphone at night - harmful or not?

• If you charge your smartphone overnight, it is usually fully charged after about two hours - i.e. 100 percent. From then on it will stop charging automatically. When the battery level has dropped slightly, the smartphone recharges to 100 percent.
• Ideally, the battery level is between 50 and 80 percent. So the battery lasts for a particularly long time. Multiple short loading times are also better than a few long loading times - like overnight. The battery level should not drop below 20 percent either.
• So charging overnight is not good for your smartphone, but how harmful is it really? If you charge the smartphone overnight, you do not have to fear that the battery will fail after a few months. The battery technology is now so mature that the battery does not matter that much.
• In the long run and with older smartphones, however, this leads to the battery suffering from nightly charging. How seriously the battery is affected is controversial. What is clear, on the other hand, is that the charger consumes electricity all night, even when the cell phone is already full. Therefore a higher electricity bill is guaranteed.

Not overnight: Charge the smartphone battery properly

• It is best to charge your smartphone in the evening. If you sit in front of the TV in the evening and watch a movie or football, your cell phone can charge. The cell phone should be switched off, as this is the quickest way to charge.
• As soon as the battery level is between 70 and 90 percent, remove your cell phone from the power and switch it off. So it doesn't use any energy and you have an ideally charged cell phone in the morning.
• Of course, if you also use your smartphone as an alarm clock, you cannot switch it off. Instead, go into airplane mode. You should also switch off all other services to save battery. For example, reduce the display brightness. Then your cell phone will lose at most two or three percent overnight.

Tip: CHIP podcast on smartphone batteries

Would you like to learn more about cell phone batteries? In our CHIP podcast, we talk to Test Center boss Wolfgang Pauler about what you should actually watch out for with smartphone batteries: Do I always have to fully discharge my cell phone before I recharge it? You can find out more and more in this episode from CHIP.Funk. You can find the podcast in our download area. There you can also download all other episodes and listen to them on the go.

On the next page we show how you can revive a weak battery