Until this time, I have been using my phone by plugging it to charger every night. Normally, leaving the phone connected to charger a long time and letting the battery sit at 100% charge is not very good for the battery. This is because both high and low battery levels are kind of strenuous to the battery. These batteries like staying more on the 30% to 80% range, and if they are kept there, theoretically, they should age a lot slower.
I don't know if it was because of that overnight charging habits, but battery health on my iPhone 12 degraded quite quickly. It was down to 78% after 5 years and 1033 cycles. Now, this is probably not bad, and even better than average. But I still had to pay a premium to Apple to get my battery replaced after 5 years. The phone itself was still in pristine condition, and its performance was quite sufficient for me. The only bad thing was when I took some photos or recorded some videos, my battery was draining like hell. Honestly, I will probably use this device 1 or 2 years more, and ideally, if I could go those additional years without changing the battery, it would be a lot better in terms of cost.
Normally, if you turn on Apple’s optimized charging system, it will try to keep the device at 80% during the night, and then only charge it to 100% in the morning. But somehow, that doesn’t seem to be working very well for me.
So, recently I’ve started adopting new charging habits. I thought, why not stop charging overnight, and only charge my phone when I wake up in the morning? iPhones charge fairly quickly these days. If I wake up with around 30% charge, I can charge it to 80% in about 20 minutes. That could provide me enough power for most of the day.
But then, I had to confront an unpleasant reality: my iPhone 12 drains almost 10% of its charge during the night. Consequently, if I leave it at 30% when I wake up, I find that it has dropped to 20%. This is problematic because:
- Those 10% unwanted drains during the night imply that the phone battery will consume one full charging cycle every 10 days. This translates to an additional 36 cycles per year and 180 cycles over the course of five years of use. Every cycle counts.
- If I leave my phone at around 30% and it drops to 20% in the morning, it would be inconvenient if I had to leave home immediately due to an emergency.
Therefore, I decided to implement the following changes on my phone every night before going to sleep:
Activate Low Power mode
Now, most of that overnight battery drain is likely due to various apps and the iPhone itself performing background tasks. By activating low power mode, you can ensure that most of these background tasks are kept at a minimum, and the CPU is clocked lower, resulting in significantly reduced energy consumption.
Disconnect from the internet
If your phone isn’t connected to the internet, most of its activities will stop. So, I figured turning off Wi-Fi and cellular data would save it a lot of energy. Just a heads up, I don’t use airplane mode because it’ll turn off my GSM line too. I want to be reachable at least by phone in case of an emergency.
By the way, going into the control center and disconnecting from Wi-Fi won’t work. It’ll just disconnect from Wi-Fi, but it’ll keep the Wi-Fi chip active. So, I just go to settings and turn off Wi-Fi completely from there.
Turn off Bluetooth
Bluetooth consumes quite low energy, but I’ll still turn it off. It’s the same as Wi-Fi; go to the settings and turn off Bluetooth from there. Avoid using the Control Center, as it will temporarily disconnect from devices. In the morning, I would revert all those settings and bring the phone back online.
Using the above settings, I noticed my 5-year-old iPhone 12 consistently used only 3% of its battery during the night. I consider this a positive outcome, so I decided to adopt this strategy.
Use Shortcuts application to automate the steps
Hey, but those settings are a pain to change every night. It’s not practical to do it manually every night and the next morning. That’s where the “Shortcuts” app on the iPhone comes in handy.
I created two shortcuts on my iPhone: one for sleep and one for waking up. The sleep shortcut just does the before-sleep stuff, and the wake-up shortcut turns everything back on.
Then, I set up two automations in the Shortcuts app to run the sleep shortcut every night at 11:00 PM and the wake-up automation every morning at 7:30 AM. And that’s it!
Here are the two shortcuts I use:
And here is the automations that run on my iPhone:
About limiting max charge on an iPhone
Note that I have an additional automation that shows a notification and speaks some text like "unplug charger" when charge level goes beyond 81%. Since iPhone 12 does not support charge limiting like newer iPhones, this is the method I use to prevent charging beyond 80% on normal days.
If you have an iPhone 15 or newer device, you will find a nice batter charging limit on the Battery settings. Just use it. My rationale for limiting the charge to 80% is to make the batter age slower. I am working on a desk 5 days a week anyways, and my charger is always with me. So, I just charge my phone to 80% in the morning, and then if it gets below 50%, I charge it again before finishing my work day, so I will have enough juice when I go out in the evening.
I have been using the phone since I replaced my battery, and it's going quite well. I hope to provide an update on the future on my battery health as my batter ages. Hope this is helpful for other people who would like to maximize their battery health in the long run.
A final note: even before seeing the results, I could argue from the things I read before that the difference between employing above strategy vs. just plugging to charger overnight and let the phone do its own thing would probably be not very marginal. Let me put a wild guess here... If I did this instead of charging overnight, my battery health could be at 85% instead of 78% after same time. If that difference is not worth the convenience loss for you, just don't bother. For me: it's just a nerd thing, and I just want to see the results with my own eyes :)
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