Why smartphone batteries last shorter in the cold and what you can do about it

Cold and technology
Battery only lasts a short time? Why your smartphone wears out more quickly in winter – and what you can do about it

Not only people and animals are suffering from the current temperatures – but also the battery life. Here you can find out why. And why the battery can even be damaged by incorrect behavior.

Ice, snow and Temperatures well below freezing point: Winter has had Germany firmly in its grip since the beginning of the year. However, this doesn’t just lead to beautiful white landscapes and dangerously slippery roads. The smartphone also breaks down more quickly. Fortunately, with a few tricks you can counteract this.

There are simple reasons why the battery loses juice more quickly in cold weather. The ability of modern lithium-ion batteries to store electricity is based on simple chemical processes. And they only work as they should in certain temperature ranges. Samsung and Apple each name an ideal operating temperature between 0 and 35 degrees Celsius for their smartphones. If it is higher or lower, the battery will not work as it should. And in extreme cases, the devices can even switch off to protect themselves. How you should generally treat the battery in order to get the most out of it for as long as possible. By the way, you can find out more in this text.

That’s why the batteries last shorter in the cold

The fact that lithium-ion batteries lose juice more quickly in the cold is due to a feature that is actually an advantage. “Lithium-ion batteries suffer so much in freezing temperatures because they have very little internal resistance,” engineer Hanumant Singh told Wired. He knows the problem well: For Northeastern University, he researches robots that can work in extreme cold such as Antarctica. At these temperatures the effect is even more noticeable. “He’s quite dramatic,” explains Singh. According to him, at -37 degrees Celsius, a fully charged smartphone battery would be completely discharged in just five minutes.

At normal temperatures, the low resistance is an advantage: Because little additional heat is generated during charging and discharging, the battery does not overheat unnecessarily. This ensures that the wear on the battery is reduced over a longer period of time, meaning that it retains its maximum charge level for longer. But it becomes a problem in the cold: Because the battery does not heat itself up during use, the chemical processes inside become increasingly slower. And the charge drops significantly faster.

Devices such as smartphones or notebooks are significantly more affected by this effect than electric cars. There, too, the range decreases when it gets cold. When the car is driven, the engine continuously draws large amounts of electricity – and the battery heats itself up. However, small devices such as smartphones and notebooks cannot achieve such performance even when they are in use. And so they can’t make up for the cooling down while not in use.

How to protect the battery

If you want to protect the battery, you should keep the devices as warm as possible. You can simply carry the smartphone close to your body instead of letting it cool down in your backpack or handbag. If you have to use it, you should keep the time in the cold air as short as possible and quickly bring it back into the warm.

If that’s not enough, you can also resort to other means: Smartphone socks may not have much to offer visually, but they can be useful for keeping the device warm. The same applies to neoprene sleeves for notebooks. There are even special cases for smartphones that are designed for use in extreme weather conditions.

Don’t leave it in the car

Leaving your smartphone or notebook in the car is a really bad idea if you want to use it again afterwards. Apple specifies a range of -20 to 45 degrees Celsius as the storage temperature for its iPhones and Macbooks. But this is especially true when you have turned off the device. Before using it, you should always bring it to operating temperature. This also applies to charging if the battery dies due to the cold: If you plug the device into the cable when it is cold, it can actually damage the battery. So it’s better to let it warm up a bit first.

A trick that increases the battery level at the same time is a power bank: while the battery is charging, it warms up slightly. Because of the problem mentioned above, you should start when the device has not yet cooled down.

Cold doesn’t just damage batteries

By the way, the battery is not the only part of technical devices that suffers from cold. The crystals of LCD displays react significantly more slowly in cold conditions, the display is delayed and simply no longer works at extremely low temperatures. Sensors such as heart rate monitors or gyroscopes, which are used to measure the movement of devices, are also designed for certain temperature ranges – and become less precise at temperatures that deviate from these.

Sources: Wired, CNN, Apple