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One thing many manufactures of laptops and cellphones recommend is that you wait until the battery is completely dead before you recharge it or else it will slowly loose its maximum capacity or have a reduced lifespan. To what extent is this true? Is this only true for certain rechargeable battery varieties?

TheEnigmaMachine
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    True for NiCd and NiMH. False and potentially dangerous for various lithium chemistries and is mostly done only to calibrate the charge meter circuitry. I'll see if I can dig up some application notes which explain that. – AndrejaKo Jul 07 '11 at 18:56
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    @AndrejaKo NiCd yes, NiMH, no. See for example, the NiMH battery in the Toyta Prius, which is never fully charged or discharged. – psusi Jul 08 '11 at 14:05

1 Answers1

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This is a very complicated issue because of number of myths surrounding it and low speed of information transition from battery manufacturers to equipment manuals.

So let's start with the lithium batteries. There are several types of them (Li-Ion, Li-Po, LiFePO4) but they have many similarities when discharge is concerned. The most important feature of them is that they are dead when completely discharged. For that reason the nominal discharge voltage is set to around 2.75 V. At that time, the battery is considered to be "discharged". For example here are some datasheets which show the claim:

Discharging battery to that voltage may cause problems and may make it unrecoverable. Some battery manufacturers recommend that the batteries shouldn't be discharged below 3.3 V/cell (for example ThunderPower) and that they should be used at lower currents for first few cycles.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find a good source for lithium battery best practices, but here are some I found:

What they basically say it that batteries shouldn't be allowed to discharge completely, shouldn't be allowed to remain in the discharged state and that they don't have the "memory" effect (an explicit claim for that can be found here and here).

On the other hand, it is considered that nickel-cadmium based batteries have memory effect (some believe that NiMH do too, but that is a separate story) and should be completely discharged to their nominal discharge voltage which is (according to this datasheet for example [link now broken]) 0.8 V. For NiMH batteries, the discharge voltage is 1.0 V, according to this datasheet [link now broken]. The base for the discharge claim comes from various best practice documents. For example, there's an article here which claims that discharging batteries to voltages lower than their nominal discharge voltage will increase amount of charge the battery can hold.

What is interesting in this whole story is that I've been unable to find a document from a battery manufacturer which explicitly explains how to properly condition batteries. It would be great if someone could dig up such documents, if they exist.

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AndrejaKo
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    This answer could be vastly improved by using meaningful link texts instead of just “this” and “here”, which makes it nigh impossible to put the references into context while reading. – Konrad Rudolph Jul 08 '11 at 11:31
  • @Konrad Rudolph Unfortunately I don't know how to better put them into context. The documents with content backing the statement are usually immediately after the statement. – AndrejaKo Jul 08 '11 at 13:28
  • Most battery manufacturers specify a graph showing the expected number of charge/discharge cycles you can get out of the battery without significant loss of capacity. The number tends to start off rather high in the 20% Depth of Discharge area, declines somewhat as you get to 50% DoD, then drops off rapidly as you exceed 70% DoD. Therefore, the best practice is to avoid discharging the battery more than 50% often, and more than 70% ever if you can help it. – psusi Jul 08 '11 at 14:17
  • @psusi Could you post a link to such a graph made by a manufacturer? The best I could find is the table form Battery University, to which I linked. – AndrejaKo Jul 08 '11 at 14:22
  • @AndrejaKo: http://www.trojanbattery.com/pdf/TRJN0153_CyclingAGMSS0210LR_000.pdf – psusi Jul 08 '11 at 14:51
  • @psusi Good to know! I guess I missed that because such batteries aren't commonly used in portable applications OP mentioned... – AndrejaKo Jul 09 '11 at 08:50
  • Batteries have a limited lifespan and after that they don't work properly and get easily discharged. I remember that I read on the Apple's website that they recommended to charge your device when it was discharged. But this could mean three things. a) By doing this you get the max of your battery (so it is recommended), b) It is bad for the battery to don't do this or c) all of the above – ajax333221 Jan 23 '12 at 06:03
  • @AndrejaKo I was able to find and fix most of the links, but the datasheet links are still broken. Can you look [here](http://www.time1.ru/data_sheet/sanyo/ni-cd/KR-1200AAE.pdf) and [here](http://www.accu-profi.de/doku/hr-3u2700.pdf) to see if they're the same PDFs? (Just go ahead and fix it if they're the right ones.) – Laurel May 07 '18 at 05:02