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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

It depends on the depth of discharge and heat management.

Laptops, phones, etc have a poor lifespan because they are frequently discharged from 100% to almost 0%. It is better to discharge them from 100% to 50% and then recharge.

Batteries generate heat during charging and smart phones can get hot during heavy use. Without good enough cooling the lifespan of the battery drops.

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It also helps to charge them more slowly, so in case of solar farms, you can increase the lifetime of a battery by using more of them and charging them more slowly. Discharge is slower as well, which also benefits lifetime.

Usually the best case scenario is 80 - 20 as far as I know.

I've heard the opposite! Any piece of information that you can share to back it up? Highly interested.

Sorry I have studied this in other language and I not even sure how these things called in English. There is one graph that I remember called Woehler curve and there is another one that shows how much is the life expectancy operating between different charging levels (which I cannot find the name for).

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Woehler-curve-for-lithiu...

Update:

It is called SN curve:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/SN-curve-applied-to-batt...

It shows a bit different picture for Li-ION that I remembered.

The reading I did years ago stressed that you should definitely cycle batteries to as close as Zero as possible, but if you want to do long-term storage keep them at 40%. Seems like there is a lot of myth around how batteries work and proper practice. A unified resource on this would be great!

Depends on the battery chemistry. NiCd and NiMh batteries which were very popular 10+ years ago do have a memory effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect

LiPo batteries do not have a memory effect, and you should avoid deep discharges.

I think the linked study gives you some insight. The problem is that we need all the capacity we get using a mobile phone for example. You can't really have a 2x capacity battery just for the ideal life time unfortunately.

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