Charging your phone carefully

Sometimes, we take for granted how we handle little things like mobile chargers.

I realised this one day at a mobile showroom. An angry customer barged in with a charger dangling in his hand. It was a brand new charger that had come with the mobile he had bought a few weeks ago. The charger had conked, he said. “The mobile was heating up every day while it was being charged, and now the charger has gone,” he said. After a few minutes, he cooled down a little and explained the problem.

He used to charge the mobile overnight. In the morning, the mobile would be fully charged, but both the mobile and the charger would be “extremely hot”, he said. And a day before, the charger had stopped working. He demanded “full replacement” of the mobile pack, not only the charger.

The store manager took out the mobile, kept it on the table along with the charger and asked the customer to take it and try charging again in the showroom. The customer did as he was told, but the mobile would not charge. He had a “I told you so” look on his face.

The manager explained what he was doing wrong. First, the customer lifted the charger with the cable. “If you keep doing it, the cable may snap, but as it was moulded, it would not be visible outside” he said. Even the simple act of winding the cord around the charger plug required care, he said. “You have to hold the edge of the cord (at the end connecting to the plug) while winding it, so that you don't snap the connection.”

The next mistake, the manager said, was charging the mobile overnight. Though some mobiles had the automatic cut-off facility when fully charged, most of them did not. Overnight charging could affect both the mobile and the charger, he said. The life of the battery could get reduced by half.

Most of us find overnight charging the easy way out, but that could be bad both for the mobile and the charger.

>dinakaran@thehindu.co.in

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