what is trickle charge? sorry for the silly question. I just can’t really understand it even after reading it over and over again. I need someone to explain it to me like I’m a toddler literally
In: Technology
It’s varying the charging rate (namely, voltage) to match the rate at which the battery is discharging rather than pumping in a flat voltage, regardless of how much the battery is being drained.
It’s when just a widdle itty bitty bit of zippy zap goes into the bataweee for a wheelie long time until it’s belly is all full
In general trickle-charge just means to charge slowly.
But some power banks seem to use this term for a special mode for charging things like wireless earbuds that don’t draw much power and apparently some power banks would turn off automatically because they didn’t think anything was connected. So trickle-charge mode forces them to stay on in a low power charge mode.
Batteries don’t hold a charge forever. Left sitting there, they will drain a small amount of energy over time despite not having anything connected to them. Power just sorta… leaks out…
“Trickle charging” is the practice of leaving a battery plugged in to compensate for this, allowing that loss to be eliminated and the charge held at 100%. The amount of power consumed is so tiny it usually doesn’t matter, and you trickle power back into the battery to make up for what leaks out.
(Side note: It is worth noting that whether this is a good idea depends on the battery type. Lithium Ion batteries, it turns out, don’t like being at 100% charge very much and will last longer if kept low. In an ideal world, for something like a power bank, you should store them at about 50% charge, and just before you need them, charge them up and then take them with you. When done, charge them back up to 50% for storage again. Whereas for a car battery, keeping it at 100% is a good thing and if you don’t plan to use the car, putting its battery on a trickle charger is probably the right idea.)
It’s just reducing the charging rate (current) to a point where the battery is neither getting charged nor discharging. In a perfect world, that’s just the same as not charging it at all. In reality, all batteries slowly lose charge even if you’re not using them. The trickle charge matches that so they don’t get discharged.
It means charging veeeeery slow. It’s like filling a large bucket one drop (trickle) of water at a time.
It’s the opposite of fast-charging, which is like filling a large bucket with a high-pressure high-capacity power hose (or a massive waterfall).
Charging very slow takes a long time (duh!) but it’s beneficial because it won’t break the charging device. A bucket filled with drops of water tends to stay intact.
Fast-charging takes a short time (duh!), but it can damage the battery of the device. Filling a bucket with the strongest power hose or biggest waterfall has a risk of breaking the bucket.
Some buckets (batteries) already have leaks on them, so trickle charging is beneficial in keeping the bucket (charge) full without actually charging them (overflowing and damaging the bucket/battery or wasting more water/energy more)
It just means charging slowly, this tends to be better for prolonging the batteries lifespan since there’s less heat involved in the process, sometimes aggressive quick charging can degrade batteries faster so some people prefer to charge slowly over a longer period
Imagine pushing a ball up a curve that gets steeper and steeper until it’s pointing straight into the air.
Eventually you’d have to be pushing the ball straight up in the air which is impossible, but you can’t let go because the ball will fall back down the curve. So eventually you’ll reach a point where you are pushing the ball up as hard as you can, the ball wants to fall back down as hard is it can, and these cancel out *safely*. The safe part is the point, since the ball wants to fall down anyway your ‘push back’ force just keeps that as they are.
My example refers to older types of batteries you won’t use as a layperson in your daily life. In these batteries there is a natural chemistry in how the batteries charge that “resists” the charging process. When the battery approaches ‘full charge’ this chemistry pushes back against the charging and a balance is created without any outside input.
Your laptop or cellphone battery are different. They won’t resist the charging the same way so they can be dangerous and get overcharged and that’s “no muy bueno” for your house not burning down.
So you need a computer device with smart programming to sense when the battery is nearly full and it’ll throttle the charging process deliberately to cut off the flow of power to the battery. Think of it like filling a car with gasoline, you want the pump to realize when the car is full and stop automatically. At that point, the battery will slowly discharge naturally even without being used so in this case “Trickle Charging” refers to the combination of 1. realizing the battery is almost full and slowing the charging process and 2. then keeping a very slow trickle of power to the battery to keep it charged at 100%.
tickling charge should not really be considered an important factor on LiIon cells/packs.
Even if not “”tickled” they will only loose like 10-20% of the full charge capacity per maybe a year if stored within proper conditions.
Tickling cells/packs however was important on NiMh and NiCd chemistry cells as they usually lost up to 3% per each day even if stored under optimal conditions. (ofc before panasonic came up with Eneloop and after this other brands with lsd (low self discharge) techniques.
It also kept the chemistry kinda say…occupied and prevented it from getting lazy or degrading on the long term.
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