There are a few things you can do to extend your battery life. Here are three tips:
- Use a power outlet that is close by. If you have an outlet near your computer, use it instead of the wall outlet. This will help increase your battery life.
- Use a screen saver or screen timeout to reduce screen time. This will help keep your computer running longer without needing to recharge the battery.
- Use a low-power device like an audio player or phone charger when you don’t need the full power of the computer or when there is no power available from the wall outlet. This will help extend your battery life by reducing how much power is used by the computer
Image by Nathan W. Pyle.
One of the primary, and easiest to apply tricks, is to toggle off the highest power consuming elements of your device. Chris writes:
For those curious why Chris waits until his battery is low to charge it: batteries have a finite number of charge cycles before the performance begins to degrade. Older Ni-Cad batteries had issues with battery memory but still had a recharge based life cycle (that said, some readers still found Ni-Cad batteries to be an ideal solution for their needs). Newer Lithium Ion batteries no longer suffer from the battery memory issues but they to have a fixed life cycle. While it takes quite a few charge cycles for performance to noticeably degrade and quite a few more for the battery to actually need a replacement, if you’re trying to really extend the life of your battery its worth paying attention to.
John Weiss uses quick toggles to turn off the high-power items on his phone:
Most of these options are buried within system menus so it’s worth searching the App Store/Marketplace for quick access widgets. Most of the time we need cellular access but not Wi-Fi and GPS—turning just those two off can significantly extend battery life.
Michael skips the whole toggle on/off routine and upgrades:
That’s a decent solution, although most of our newer electronics have pretty good batteries, historically we’ve gone the upgrade route. It doesn’t make sense to use a 1200 mAh battery in your cellphone if you can get a cheap 2000mAh battery that fits in the same space.
Xaviant goes a step further than simply toggling and uses Tasker to manage his connectivity:
For my phone (Android), I use Tasker to turn off things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth after about 10 minutes of no connectivity, and also to turn off when I go to sleep. I keep GPS off most of the time because I never really use it, And I usually get about 18 hours out of it before I ever need a charge. On top of that I also bought a universal backup battery from Duracell, just in case I ever kill it playing a game or something.
My iPod Touch is usually set to airplane mode when it’s off the dock. Just listening to music, it lasts me about 3 days before it ever needs a charge.
