Gadgetory

hey everyone today we were talking about batteries battery types charging and getting the most out of your batteries for laptops phones whatever I am joined by Patrick Stone and we if you're wondering how this topic came about we actually got into a fight over it and I won so we're doing a video on how different types of batteries so there's there's lithium-ion yep what is the other ones nickel cadmium and nickel metal hydride or National Institute of Mental Health right yes and I mah would be the the chemical I guess composition or something yeah and then also in some mice like this new one we have here some mice and other smaller devices use a lithium polymer or a high poly right tablet with it yeah tablets use a lot of it and we'll talk about what all those different types of batteries are and how they work and stuff like that so why don't you start us out with some more of the archaic forms of batteries yeah so I'm old and these batteries are all just kidding I know that but the nickel cadmium and the nickel metal hydride batteries have been around for a while nickel cadmium I believe was the first one that came out and the idea there is that it's it's good but it can't produce the same kind of I guess battery charge that you want to have over a long period of time that say like a lithium-ion can and so the kind of the thing that went through time was we started out with the nickel cadmium and then eventually somebody was like hey what about nickel metal hydride nickel metal hydride was a little bit better and the these are both okay but these cells in these guys can't really give us a lot of voltage whereas they when they discovered the lithium ion and stuff yeah it was a different ballgame well there's alkaline - ish is more familiar to anyone using double-a batteries that aren't rechargeable so these alkaline ones they're sort of single-shot you get them once this is actually 1.5 volt battery and technically this nickel metal hydride one this is a rechargeable battery we use for our camera women and it's got 1.2 volts and so something interesting we learned about this yeah is that the 1.5 volt battery will actually sort of on the surface of things that looks like it should last longer and and they sort of do in our experience because the extra voltage but they have a voltage one with voltage depression depression is what it's often a right you like a lot of people think of rechargeable batteries like nickel cadmium and nickel metal hydride as having a memory effect thing that's going on there but the term that is I guess it's better for is a voltage depression and what you're seeing is that over time over the the use of the battery the the nickel cadmium battery is going to be like 1.5 volts and then in a very linear way it's going to go from 1.5 down to like 1.2 and then down to like 1 and stop working yeah yeah and and then appetizer deco cadmium with the alkaline stop right now alkaline batteries and then these guys what they're going to do is they're going to kind of stay 1.2 and just 1.2 in a nope it's dead you ready yeah so that's the that's the difference in those two for sure and the so memory isn't the right word for these but the voltage depression works and then that applies to the older laptops use the old nickel did ma'am yeah like if you were two laptops with those really great screens that were like this big it had like 640 by 480 resolution those were the nickel cadmium right and eventually made it to like 600 or 800 about 600 resolution nickel metal hydride batteries right and then we we eventually got to this really great 1024 by 768 resolution and that was kind of the transition interval with EMI yeah and so lithium ions what everyone is pretty much familiar with on the side of things that still being used you'll find nickel metal hydride in these types of batteries you don't really find lithium ion in these from what we've seen yeah and that's probably because of some of the logic that lithium ion requires yeah then he says logic he's just talking about like that there's these guys have circuitry inside of them to manage the cells right so these have a certain amount of cell and when you research your laptop batteries you'll see they all kind of a different cell count and that partially dictates the longevity of the battery per use and when talking about battery longevity there's there's a few key items here one of them that probably a lot of people don't know is that your battery actually is sort of lying to you when it says that there's a 100% charge it's not actually a hundred percent of what this is capable of because it will sort of section off a piece of the battery as reserve yep and that's because once it falls below a certain percentage depending on the battery once it falls below a certain percentage charge the lithium actually becomes volatile and can combust and so they'll use this logic in part to control that and make sure it doesn't fall too low in normal use I mean unless you're cool with having batteries exploding on your shelves which actually happened with some laptops on planes if you look it up they were I think one of the articles called them terrorists laptops and it's because the charge was the battery was defective and I used the magnesium housing for the laptop and so it made fire so you don't want that and that is why these will lie to you about the actual life of the battery so interesting thought here is looking at battery life so when lithium-ion batteries first came out your battery life was an hour and you were excited that it was an hour you were just saying how battery life and now if your laptop doesn't have six hours of battery life you're thinking what the heck is going on so the question may be hey did the lithium-ion batteries get better right or what changed how things go if you hit me with something so I can start with the hardware mm-hmm so lower TDP CPUs GPUs especially as you move towards the ten nanometer process yep you know that this is why TDP is important because you'll see chips that are drawing like 14 watts or something for the really low-end stuff yeah versus verses like 7080 whatever you know the pan years ago back first-gen Nehalem was like 140 watts and now Intel's down to the 40s 50s yeah so that's that's certainly one thing mmm another thing I was thinking about too is we mentioned a few minutes ago that the chips inside the batteries kind of control you know is the better charge the better not charged how many charge cycles working with I'm going to have to manage the the circuitry itself has gotten more intelligent right so being able to manage the charge and discharge the battery how rapidly the discharge is occurring that kind of stuff that's helping the batteries to last longer as well yeah then charge cycles is sort of a constant with lithium-ion batteries so these batteries kind of almost very vaguely like NAND there's a certain amount of cycles they can go through before it's it's basically dead so if you've ever held on to a laptop long enough you will eventually get notifications from Windows that the battery needs to be replaced soon yeah and that's because it's no longer getting the charge it used to and so these batteries kind of on average will be 500 to 1000 charge cycles meaning how many times they can be charged and as you burn through those it will reduce the the effective length of the battery per charge mm-hmm and that also impacts a couple of other things but the charge cycles specifically they it's not all sort of one level of abuse the charge cycles are more abusive if you charge them a certain way yep if you blast the battery with current like you know there's little speed chargers right that'll spare batteries for your phone so those will charge you up pretty quickly sometimes yeah but I mean how do they they do it by lasting voltage right right yeah so you know when you're talking about power there are two it two real parts there there's the voltage in the current and the battery voltage like your computer needs say like 19 volts and that's listed on the battery if you look at the battery labels 14.4 for this one and 11.1 right here and then it has a milliamp power piece here and so when you're talking about the power you're talking about your current and your voltage and so charging the battery back up you're you're more worried about your current and you are with your voltage your voltage isn't really changing and so if you have like a quick charger you're you're shoving I this is kind of a bad way to say this shoving current back into the battery faster then really the chemical processes are ready to commit to and so that can that can be not good for the battery right and again we're using looser terminology here yeah well also in terms of things the users can see if you do that with your cell phone personally anyway you'll normally see that the if you charge to a hundred percent with a non-standard charger for the phone you might see that the hundred percent actually is shorter yeah usable life than using your wall charger so that is that's part of that yeah and then best practices for battery charging so one is used the correct charger yes absolutely if at all possible like don't switch from your factory charger because their factory charger will usually have the exact same voltage and current specs that your battery does and it's going to charge your battery the way it's supposed to a lot of times the charger and the battery the microchips inside of them will actually talk to each other that is if they're you know high enough quality a lot of them are just you know real basic but hey if it sign of quality they'll talk to each other and they'll understand how to work together and that again will make your battery last longer and it's going to make your computer last longer as a user which rate and charge cycles wise you want to try and be as unabie Civ as possible so when you're using your laptop or other device do try to occasionally run it down and when you're charging if let's say you put your laptop away for a while you don't use it and it's kind of good practice to just unplug it and and let it sit and then you're Betty will be slightly drained when you turn it back on depending on how long you leave it sitting because if they don't hold a charge forever but it will be better for it than just constantly delivering sort of a trickle to the ya-ya and one of the things too it is a good idea every once in a while to just like drain your battery all the way and then charge along back oh right that's a good idea helps with them sort of memory thing even though it's not really supposed to yes yeah okay it helps your battery to operate at its fullest potential let's just say right and then the last type of battery these lithium polymer ones I'm holding up this mouse because I think this has one I know a lot of wireless mice do the reason they do is because it's sort of a conformable battery yeah so it's actually like a pouch of I guess like a liquid almost and that that can be shaped around whatever is inside of your device so if you have a weird area like this we now have a square surface right to spread hard cells across and you can use a hawai poly your lipo yep exactly right so that's really new but otherwise they're basically lithium ion in terms of present size yeah yeah we were reading when we're doing some research we try to do that every one so every research we're reading that the original lithium polymer batteries work the same as lithium ion batteries right but kind of the the nomenclature has become that lithium polymer batteries are just lithium ion technology at this point yeah at this point they're technically the battery this is a lithium-ion polymer or something like yeah I think it's which I but basically lipo battery yep so that's more than you ever wanted to know about batteries hopefully hopefully helps someone out there we have an old article I've written about best practices for laptop charging and charge cycles so I'll link that below it's pretty old but it's all the rage stuff yeah it's worth it yeah it's good good stuff to know so thank you for watching as always patreon link post all video at check it out if you want to help us out directly thank you for leaving a comment if you have any questions and we might address it in a future video so we'll see you all next time