So, I’m going to college up in the catskills of New York, meaning it’s currently about 7°F where I am.
I went on a walk the other day with my DAP, and noticed it randomly rebooted in the cold, but then worked fine inside. I figured that was just one of the perils of niche, low volume android devices, but just today my well-built smartphone died randomly at 50% battery and refused to reboot.
I get that this has to be something with battery, but I thought it was supposed to be heat that killed batteries. And besides, I don’t remember my Gameboy Advance ever dying of frostbite.
In: Technology
Batteries are electrochemical energy storage devices, and the cold slows down all kinds of chemical reactions.
If you cool down a battery, it has a harder time releasing the energy that’s stored in it, a bit like a water tank with a partially-frozen pipe. The electricity comes out in a trickle, which may be enough to keep a device running in standby, but as soon as it tries to draw a large amount of power, the output voltage of the battery collapses and the device shuts down.
Heat does degrade batteries in the long term because it accelerates that processes that make a battery wear out. Cold prevents a battery from working correctly because it slows everything down.
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