After returning from a family trip a few days ago, I was incredibly lazy and left my phone charger in the vehicle, for 3 days straight. I don’t know what I was even thinking, sometimes things like that can happen to my brain. I was charging my phone out of my laptop’s usb port, and everything seemed alright.

Anyway, it was nowhere near as nice as using a proper charger, since the laptop’s output was incredibly slow. Thankfully I didn’t use it much, and if I did, it was still plugged, so I didn’t really care. The first night was alright, I left my phone connected through my sleep and nothing of interested happened when I woke up that day.

However, the morning after that one, I woke up to a phone that was incredibly hot. I felt it through my pillow, while it was still rather early. I immediately unplugged it and in my panic I decided to leave it in the freezer for a few minutes. I tooted about the event, and from there I’ve been a lot more worried about my phone’s longevity.

You may be wondering, why would my phone heat so much, since the previous day was fine? I had no idea. But I did something different. At first, I left my laptop on, and it went to sleep and turned off the display all by itself while still logged in. The next day, however, I logged off and closed the lid. Maybe some process or daemon that manages the USB port got interrupted or something, but it is what it is, and I can only wonder the exact reason behind the overheating. The worst thing is that the phone didn’t even charge to 100%, but I guess that was actually a good thing, maybe I would have ended up with an inflated battery, or worse.

After the incident, I installed a couple of apps, such as Battery Guru and GSam Battery Monitor. It had honestly been a while since I was so worried about battery life. My Redmi Note 8 has always been reliable, and I always have just enough battery, as long as I don’t play games for too long. So, with a bit of self-control it has never been that bad.

Now I started to feel like my battery lasts less time than before. I don’t trust myself of course, since I feel like it’s just a placebo and my battery is as good as it can be after 2 years of usage. Perhaps just a single day being super hot won’t actually affect the battery that much.

Honestly, I’ve been using my phone for 2 years already, living a life of Custom ROM hopping since its bootloader got unlocked, and it still rocks Android 13 like a champ. I can live charging it a bit more often anyway.

For now, I installed Battery Charge Limit to get it to never charge beyond 80% (it requires root access), to learn to live with a bit less, for a longer period of time. But who knows, its possible that I’ll get to get a new phone this year and pass this one down to my younger siblings. If you want to help with that you can always send me a tip or something ;)

Sorry for being shameless, but I had to try…

This is day 38 of #100DaysToOffload
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