Am wondering why they don’t just preserve their charge until the next time someone decides to use them.
In: Engineering
Imagine a battery is like a water bottle with a small leak, where a drop leaks every two days. Even if you don’t drink from it, water slowly drips out over time. Similarly, a battery slowly loses its stored energy even when it’s not being used, because of tiny “leaks” in the form of slow chemical reactions inside.
So, even if you leave a battery unused, it will still lose charge because of these unavoidable, natural processes happening inside it
To understand this properly, you need to understand what entropy is.
A battery is essentially 2 chemicals that are forced to either end of a tube against their will, they will “move back” if given the chance, and the easiest way for them to do so is to release electrons on one end and take electrons on the other side, which eventually allows them to return to their natural arrangement.
If you don’t connect anything to either side, over time the chemicals will just tend towards the natural state.
Some batteries stay “charged” longer than others, but some of them will do this very quickly.
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