Is Turbo/Fast Charge Bad for Battery?

The year 2015 has been the year of smartphones with fast charging capabilities as we saw almost all major manufacturers putting turbo/fast/quick charging capabilities on their Flagship devices. But is it good for your battery life?

Impact of fast chargers on battery life has long been debated. But there has never been a conclusive answer on that, much because usage patterns are so different for every user that it’s almost impossible come up to a conclusive result, unless you’ve the resources to strictly augment the process for a couple of months. Of course, regular users like us can’t do that, or say don’t give much concern to it because for the regular users if the manufacturer is providing something as a feature on their devices, then it must be for good only.

However, we personally believe fast charging could negatively affect battery life on your device. But the impact isn’t really that much for you to care about it. Still, if you just have to care about your battery life in the long run (say 2-4 years) then you should cut the number of times you charge your device using a turbo / fast charger.

Turbo charging is really a useful feature, but if you wish to go friendly with your battery you can keep a normal charger around the places you spend your most time at so that you can charge your device at normal rate when you’re not in a hurry.

Use your turbo charger only at times when you are short on time and your device’s battery is at 20-30%. That will make sure you don’t run out of battery when you need your smartphone.

However, if you only have a turbo/fast charger with you then you may use a charge-only cable for slow charging your device even when using a fast charger.

Fast charging requires data communication to the charger to be able to fast charge your device. Using a charge-only cable will not provide data communication between the turbo/fast charger and your device, so would not let fast-charging happen.

Also, on a different note, fast chargers tend to heat up the battery while charging, so make sure you don’t use your device while it’s on a fast charge as it’s pretty unsafe to use a device when its battery is hot and charging.

If you’ve ever run any small or large tests of your own to check if fast charging is bad for battery life, then do let us know about it in the comments section below.

Posted by
Shivam Malani

Shivam is our resident designer and web developer who also enjoys writing. He loves to meditate, drive on the freeways and hunt for snipers during his Call Of Duty playtime. Email: [email protected]