Comment by ActorNightly
4 days ago
Most phones can have battery removed somewhat destructively, but without affecting the rest of the phone.
Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the battery should be safe virtually indefinitely - the battery management on board will keep it in a state where its a constant charge which means the chemistry will be stable.
There were several generalizations in that statement that align with my similar fears to the OP. Most firmware should minimize the charge cycling, most batteries should be stable at constant charge... most isn't great for something that I want to sit in the corner undisturbed for a decade just chugging along - I have a few old desktops I use whenever I need a stand alone server or to host something web-live for a while. They'll eventually have hardware failures, but I have a lot more confidence that when they fail it won't be dramatic or destructive - ditto with old laptops, the serviceability expectations are much higher than phones so I have yet to meet a laptop I can't pop open and just pull the battery out of to run on AC alone - in the case of a power failure the UPS can't cover I'd rather the machine just power off rather than needing to deal with the possibility of dramatic failure.
I think if you're considering re-harvesting old devices to use for hosting and get far enough down your list to get to phones then you've likely got enough constant maintenance costs in overseeing things that the additional worry of fire risk just isn't worth it.
What makes your UPS any less of a fire timebomb?
It uses lead-acid batteries, for one.
My UPS is a single device that I have accepted the cost of maintaining and require for my daily use computer - it has to be regularly replaced because the nature of UPSes is a very limited and usually well documented shelf-life.
Every old hardware needing a fan is also a silent fire risk.
A fire risk? I think it'd be exceptionally rare for that kind of thing to lead to a fire instead of just dead parts (assuming no overtemperature protections). Even people with the 600 w melting GPU cables don't end up with an actual fire.
Batteries, however, are absolute hellfire when they go wrong (because of chemistry - not just the temperature).
> Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the battery should be safe virtually indefinitely
What is your source on this?
I've replaced the battery in always-plugged-in iPhone 3 times over 10 years because it was expanding into a spicy pillow.
I too want a way to run phones directly off of USB power, without a battery present.
Go to ifixit.com, look up your phone's battery replacement steps, stop half way through :)
Yeah the first two times Apple did it for me. Then Apple stopped supporting battery replacements on a phone that old, so I ordered a battery replacement kit on Amazon and did it myself, with ifixit.com's assistance.
Never again. I was genuinely shocked the thing turned on once I closed it up. It's one thing to have a conceptual understanding of how tiny the components inside a phone are. It's another thing to actually be trying to seat a plug into a socket with tweezers and just have no idea how you're supposed to tell if it's fully inserted or not.
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I'm not educated enough in this area to have any expertise, however, in my personal experience leaving a lithium-ion battery plugged all the time results in scary semi-exploded batteries that also stop working.
Would you say this is a chemistry/QA problem? Have there been advances in battery / controller technology that achieves the above?
Yeah I was about to say the same thing! I leave my steam deck plugged in all the time (it is my main computer) and the battery still popped (valve replaced it for free ofc)
How uh, does one find out about battery problems? I almost exclusively use laptops, and I tend to leave them plugged in most of the time. I don't want a sudden lithium-ion battery fire. Can I detect ahead of time that things are going bad?
(My current machine is a Thinkpad P52 if it matters, but I also use older Macbooks and newer Thinkpads and older Dell machines this way, although they're plugged in less often these days.)
With old MacBooks, the bottom bulges out and you notice because it doesn't sit on the four rubber feet anymore but on one central point – it wobbles and you can spin it around.
1. Improve longevity by charging Li-Ion only up to 85% of marketed capacity (can be configured at least on Thinkpads).
2. Open up the laptop and check if battery is swollen. After about 10 years, it's also a good idea to replace the CMOS battery before leaking.
3. Without opening, sometimes keys/trackpads don't work anymore as expected. This might be due to swollen battery packs (we had several Dells where this happened).
Of the six old Android phones I have around, two of them I don't dare turn on due to swollen batteries. I guess it depends how old the devices are whether this was a real risk, but I won't leave devices plugged in anymore for this reason.
Depends on your phone. Just has to replace the battery on a generally always-plugged in Moto (at least after a certain age). Battery had pillowed out. It's acting as our "landline" with a link2cell on some old DECT handsets.
if the power resets, the phone will boitloop without a battery?