Maintain your iPads battery health with these charging tips.
When you buy a new iPad, you most certainly get the advertised battery life. However, as time passes, your iPad’s battery health will slowly but surely deteriorate.
Battery degradation is natural to lithium-ion batteries used in iPads, smartphones, and most gadgets. Hence, there’s no way to keep your iPad’s battery 100% healthy.
However, you can maintain your iPad’s battery health by adopting optimal charging habits. In this article, we’ll discuss the best charging tips you should embrace to maintain your iPad’s battery health.
1. Don’t Fully Charge or Drain Your iPad’s Battery
As we’ve pointed out above, iPads use lithium-ion batteries, which usually reduce capacity as you continue charging and discharging your device. With each complete charge cycle, the maximum charging capacity of the battery slightly reduces.
Lithium-ion batteries take a big hit if you fully charge them as it makes them susceptible to overheating, which in turn reduces their lifespan. This is why you may have noticed that your iPad’s battery charges faster from 0 to 80%, then enters the slow charging phase from 80% to 100%.
Conversely, fully discharging lithium-ion batteries is just as bad, and hence, Battery University recommends that you keep your charge between 30% and 80% for maximum battery life.
2. Use Apple’s Official Charger
This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s always worth mentioning. When you buy a new iPad, Apple always includes a power adapter and a USB-C charging cable. Using an official power adapter and charging cable is always recommended because they are optimized to ensure your battery’s long-term health.
And it’s not just about maintaining iPad battery health. An official iPad charger is also safer to use. However, it’s worth mentioning that there are some excellent third-party iPad chargers that you can use.
Just avoid cheap third-party iPad chargers from no-name brands, as they can be bad for long-term battery health and might be a safety risk, too. If you’re going to buy a charger, we recommend getting one made by Apple. If not, then get one from reputable accessory makers like Anker, Satechi, or Belkin.
Apple even sells select accessories from third-party companies on its website, so you can use that as a benchmark on which third-party chargers are the best.
3. Enable Optimized Battery Charging
Optimized Battery Charging is a feature available on your iPad that learns your daily charging routine and optimizes charging to help extend battery life. The feature is meant to reduce your battery’s wear and tear.
It does so by delaying charging your battery past 80% if it predicts that you will have your iPad plugged in for a long time. At the same time, the feature also ensures that you’ll have your battery charged by the time you unplug the charger.
You can enable Optimized Battery Charging in iPadOS from Settings. open the Settings app and select Battery > Battery Health > Optimized Battery Charging. Toggle on the feature.
As alluded to before, keeping your battery level between 30% and 80% is the best way to maintain iPad battery health. But, Optimized Battery Charging doesn’t stop your battery from charging past 80%. It only delays it, and keeping tabs on your battery levels.
4. Don’t Leave Your iPad Plugged In Overnight
Having your iPad plugged in overnight is common. Most of us are guilty of this, but iPads are not meant to be plugged in overnight. As noted before, charging your battery to 100% may cause overheating, negatively impacting your iPad’s battery life in the long run. You should, therefore, avoid having your iPad plugged in overnight.
5. Half-Charge Your iPad for Long-Term Storage
If, for some reason, you want to put away your iPad for some time, you need to control the environmental temperature and the battery percentage. These two will affect battery life while your iPad is in storage.
Apple recommends charging your iPad’s battery to about 50% if you need to store it long-term to maintain battery health.
The 50% recommended level is because if you fully charge your battery and store it for an extended period, it may lose some capacity, affecting the battery life. And if you leave it fully discharged for an extended time, Apple says, “the battery could fall into a deep discharge state, which renders it incapable of holding a charge.”
Excess heat can affect battery health. Apple recommends keeping your iPad between 32 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and points to the range of 62 to 72 degrees as the comfort zone. This means keep your iPad in the shade at the beach, out of locked cars in the summer, and off of heaters in the winter. Additionally, you should recharged your iPad to 50 percent every six months (in case you’re storing your device for more than six months). You should also shut down your iPad if you want to keep it for an extended period without use.
6. Charge Your iPad at Moderate Ambient Temperatures
Heat is the biggest enemy of all kinds of batteries. According to Battery University, extreme care has to be taken when charging lithium-ion batteries because of the delicate nature of the process.
Furthermore, Apple says charging your device in high ambient temperatures can damage battery capacity. According to the company, the sweet spot lies between 50 to 95 degrees F.
Also, if you have a case that envelopes your iPad and can cause it to heat up when it’s charging, remove your iPad from the case before charging it.
Use These Charging Tips to Maintain Your iPad’s Battery Health
While batteries can’t last forever, you can at least take good care of them to avoid replacement sooner than required. Besides, replacing a iPad’s battery is costly; it will set you back by at least $99 for regular iPad models and about $199 for iPad Pro models, according to Apple. But by following the tips highlighted, you can make your iPad’s battery last longer.