Letting my battery drain until 0

jnlimon

This question has been debated for many years. The conventional wisdom seems to be = NO.

There are situations where the deep drain is prescribed as a fix of some kind, however.

In a thread a couple months ago, our resident Socratic philosopher posted this in which he sums up the conventional wisdom(s):

Battery Maintenance: Part 53 ;-)

CCC

You only need to drain your battery and charge to 100% once a month and the purpose is to calibrate the battery charge meter.

Apple recommends that you do exactly what you are doing about once a month. The iPad battery needs to be "calibrated" occasionally.

Barry

Barry Hemphill and bobsuefert,

I am pretty sure P.....V......'s post had that advice included, but if not, your calibration advice is of course Apple's instruction.

To that end, I am having issues with my Pismo battery and I had NOT followed that regimen. I guess MY question would be - "What would be the consequences for not 'calibrating the battery' once per month?" Symptoms you would expect?

thanx in advance

CCC

Not calibrating has no effect on battery life. I haven't had any problems by not calibrating monthly, I suppose the worst that can happen the charge icon wouldn't give you an accurate reading.

thanx bob

clearly not the cause of my battery problem then. What about just leaving the AC Adapter plugged for loooonnng periods? Break a relatively new battery if one never uses the PB on the battery?

CCC

I haven't had any problems leaving my iPad on the charger. I don't understand the second question, what's a PB ? When all else fails a trip to the Apple Store may be helpful

iPad: Charging the battery

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4060

Charging Tip - Switching to airplane mode turns off battery-draining wireless and cellular access, allowing your iPhone/iPad to recharge up to twice as fast.

Best Practices for iPad Battery Charging

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/best-practices-for-ipad-batte ry-charging/

How to Save and Prolong the battery life of your new ipad

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4480944?tstart=0

Prolong battery lifespan for iPad / iPad 2 / iPad 3: charging tips

http://thehowto.wikidot.com/prolong-battery-lifespan-for-ipad

 Cheers, Tom 😉

PB = Powerbook (Pismo). He's not referring to any recent hardware; this is from the early 2000's I believe. Those batteries were/are quite different from the newer lithium ion as well (as far as I know).

Thank you. My limited knowledge of iPads won't be very useful then.

To my knowledge, no.

Barry

Jnlimon wrote:

The problem is, I have been constantly draining to 0. Does that have an effect on the device?

It's not a good thing to do with lithium ion batteries. There's a reason the phone tries to shut itself off before it gets to 0%. If you drain your battery completely and leave it in that state for an extended time, it may never accept a charge again. Lithium ion batteries are best kept charger. Is there any reason you feel you need to do this?

TThere really is no reason to wait to charge the battery other than to recalibrate the battery. This doesn't need to be done a lot, but it is recommended by Apple to be done monthly. You are not going to hurt your battery by charging it before it is depleted. This was something in the past with NiCad batteries, however with Lithium Ion batteries, that is a thing of the past. Now they are more rated in cycles...?With that said, a cycle is not plugging in the battery and then removing it, it's more rated as a complete charge. In other words, depleting the battery to 50% and then charging to 100%, would still not be a cycle. Repeating the process again would then count as 1 cycle.