For those of you who've followed my journey on this page for the decade or so you know I have an OCD like fear of running out of battery. I top up my battery right away - I know it's probably not the best, but I always want to make sure it's good to go.
There are other devices I have that I may leave plugged in longer than I should. A tablet that needs some juice, I'll plug it in downstairs and forget it meaning it could be on charge for day or more. A portable battery pack or bluetooth speaker fall in the same boat.
Leaving things on charge too long can be bad for the battery inside.
Luckily, many devices these days have some sort of power cycling built into the charger, my Pixel has 'adaptive charging' that will slow down the charge so it's not constantly just pumping the full juice at a near full battery.
If your device doesn't have this kind of tech and then you put it on charge overnight, you might be overcharging it. Probably not too bad here and there, but over a year that can build up.
So, here's a little adapter from Lava - the Charge-Check.
Essentially, this $30 adapter sits in between your device and the charger.
You can see here at the office I have a tablet I rarely use, and often plug it in for days because I forget about it. I don't want it overly charging, so I could use this.
In terms of ports, it has a microUSB port that you plug from the charger into the unit. Then you have a USB-A port that's now going to be under the charge protection. Plug whatever you want in.
The idea here is that you plug it in and then hit the button. It'll start to allow the juice to flow. Once it senses that the battery is full, it shuts itself off for a set period of time. Default setting is 3, but you can adjust it.
This allows the device to slowly discharge, and after a set amount of time, turn itself back on and allow the electricity to flow.
Pretty smart.
It's only $30, and even though our more modern devices may have that protection built in, there probably are several use cases you can think of to protect. Like I'm thinking of the myriad of bluetooth speakers I have, or I've seen lots of places with semi-permanently mounted tablets for room bookings, that probably have a battery in them and are constantly charging - this $30 item will help that last way longer.
My parents have a digital photoframe... instead of waiting for it to die and then plug in, or keeping it constantly plugged in, we could use something like this constantly cycling the battery for it.
Neat.
It's got a few other tricks up its sleeves which you can look at in their advanced features on their site, like different kinds of day/night modes. Trouble is that it only has one button and 2 little lights - it feels like setting up those old timer switches, the interface could be improved in someway, but you get what you pay for.
One of the downsides is that you'll forget that it's there, so when you go to grab the cable the next day to plug in whatever it is that you're plugging in; you'll have to remember to press the black button to start it charging. Else, it'll just sit there not charging. Not a big deal, but of the week or so I've used this, I think I've only remembered like maybe a couple times, the rest realized it 30 minutes or so later after plugging in.
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