Lithium batteries are sensitive and require looking after to maximise their life expectancy.
Our 5 top tips for battery care:
1. Charge a little bit whenever you can. Lithium-ion batteries do not respond well to being charged all the way up and then run all the way down. They take much better to little bits of charge here and there.
2. If you need to store your battery for a while, do it in a cool dry place. Lithium-ion batteries despise heat. A li-ion battery that's been exposed to temperatures of around 100 degrees Fahrenheit for a year will lose about 40 percent of its overall charge capacity. At 75 degrees, it'll lose only about 20 percent.
3. Store batteries with a little bit of charge. If you're storing batteries, you give them about a half a charge first. They'll slowly lose their charge over time, and if it drops into the true-zero danger zone, your battery will automatically trip its safety circuit and kill itself for real before it can become unstable.
4. Avoid physical stress. Drops and falls can damage batteries, causing it to leak a cocktail of corrosive chemicals, all of which are bad for electronics.
5. The first stage of healing is acceptance...No matter how many times you bring it back to life, your battery will die someday or at least degrade into a shadow of its former self. It's physics. It's unavoidable. Most lithium-ion batteries have a rated lifetime of somewhere between 500 and 1,500 charge cycles.
