Some batteries that sit in unused electronics for an extended amount of time don’t hold charges anymore.
So is it better to periodically charge electronics that aren’t used regularly just to keep the battery from losing its useable life? Or is it reasonably just a matter of time before batteries aren’t reasonably usable?
In: Technology
The answer to your question varies. There are just a bunch of types of batteries. The chemical reaction that is used in liquid-filled batteries (like used to be in car batteries) is one of the oldest chemical reactions known to man. **Understanding this one is the easiest way to understand all the others.**
In this reaction there are two pieces of metal. The important thing is they’re not the same kind of metal. The metal pieces both hang in a tub of acid (or alkaline, depends on the battery). **The metal is being slowly dissolved by the battery.** As this happens, little hunks of metal float over to the other piece of metal. They get stuck. This is called electroplating. This is how ancient smiths plated things. We’ve been doing this for as long as we’ve been making things of metal.
Humans figured out that if you touched the other piece of metal – the one being covered – you got a brief shock. We eventually figured out stuff we could do with that shock. That led to ways we tried to get a more consistent shock instead of a burst of shock. Now we have tons of types of batteries, with a bunch of different ways they all do essentially the same thing.
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