When an old battery or electronic device looses its charge after not being used for several months or years, where does the lost energy from the previous charge “go”?

Question

Is it just lost in thin air? Lost as heat even though the device is not used? Thank you for the insight.

In: 0

Answer 1

In general in nature/physics, things tend to level out. A pile of bricks will fall down, never spontaneously assemble itself, iron will rust. This is known as entropy, broadly speaking. Things tending towards their state of least energy.

This happens by all kinds of mechanisms, but is universal. A charged battery is in a higher energy state than an uncharged pile of chemicals, so will inevitably tend towards the lower energy state. This may be a slow degradation of the chemicals inside, a tiny leak, even a slow discharge through the insulators between the two parts of the battery cell (no insulator is absolute, but some are much better than others).

Many electronic devices also use “quiescent current” – they have a super low power mode, but stay alive – just – to monitor their own battery health for instance. They use microamps, but that’s still power being used.