Many of you have probably received advice over the years about how to make sure your battery is performing at it's peak and continues to do so for the longest period of time. Due to changes in battery technology, that advice may have changed or is no longer relevant.
Here's my list of battery performance/longevity tips that I use which seems to work for my devices:
1) Before turning it on for the first time, charge your gadget to full capacity
While your gadget will generally come with enough battery capacity to use it until you get home, I always find it best to charge the device to full capacity before turning it on for the first time. With older batteries it may have been suggested to let it charge overnight however I don't feel it is necessary to do so anymore.
2) Let the battery achieve full discharge on the first run before recharging
It's important to clarify a couple of things here. First, I define a full discharge as letting the battery get below 20% capacity. Second, modern day batteries may get damaged if you do a full discharge too often. As such, this is one of the few times I will actually discharge a battery completely.
3) Batteries won't start performing at optimal levels until after the 3-5th charge cycle
Battery life of your new gadget not quite what you were expecting? Don't worry yet. I find that most batteries have a break in period of between 3 - 5 charge cycles before they start to achieve maximum longevity.
4) Try and keep your batteries at 40-80% capacity
I only heard this one recently but it makes a lot of sense to me. While letting a battery get too low in capacity often may damage cells and reduce it's lifespan, keeping a battery charged at full/near full capacity too often can also have the same effect. If you keep a laptop plugged in the majority of the time and suddenly put it on battery power, you will find the charge will not last as long as when you first got the device.
5) If battery performance starts to decrease prematurely, perform a full discharge and a trickle recharge
This is the other situation where I will perform a full discharge. If a battery seems like it's not holding it's charge for as long as it should it might be worth doing a full discharge and a trickle recharge.
A trickle recharge is charging the battery at a slower rate than normal to let the cells develop a charge without the risk of overheating them. If your gadget can charge via a computers USB port this is ideal as a USB port can only produce 500 mAh of power, which is generally less that what a gadgets AC power adapter would generate.
6) If you plan to store a battery without using it for a long period of time (over 30 days), only charge it to 50-60% capacity
Again, advice I have only come across recently and something many of you won't need to think about. However if you do need to keep a battery in storage for more than 30 days, try and only charge it to 50-60% capacity.
That's my rules for keeping batteries performing at their peak and maintaining their lifespan for as long as possible. Anything you disagree with or any other rules you use to get the best out of your batteries?