What Causes Your Phone’s Battery to Charge So Slowly?
Phone batteries always seem to take forever at the worst possible moments! A beat-up cable can cut your charging speed in half and those background apps are draining power faster than your basic charger can put it back.
A few factors can work together to slow down your charging speeds. Your charging gear does matter plenty. Temperature around your phone and how much you actually use it matter just as much too. Even the best charging setup can’t fix an aging battery.
Hot or cold phones will automatically slow down charging to protect themselves. Keep your phone busy while it’s plugged in and it can burn power faster than most standard chargers can pour it back in. Most newer phones support really fast charging (240 W and up). Many users still rely on those old 5 W bricks that make everything drag on.
Usually the most obvious factor worth checking is that the cable or brick might just be shot.
Common culprits behind your phone’s frustratingly slow charging speeds include these issues!
Problems with Your Charging Equipment
Your charging cable could be the culprit behind your slow charge problems. A frayed or damaged cable can cut your charge speed right in half – and it happens all the time.
Charger blocks matter every bit as much as the cable. Your brand-new phone supports very fast 65 W charging. Yet it ends up connected to that old 5 W charger that’s been in your drawer for years. This ends up as a huge bottleneck that makes your phone charge super slowly.
Different USB ports push very different amounts of power and this gap shocks most of us. Older USB-A ports that we’ve all used for years max out at around 12 watts. USB-C ports are much faster and can hit 100 watts or more – a difference that’s obvious when you need to leave quickly.
Cheap cables at gas stations and convenience stores might look like a quick way to save a few dollars. They’re usually anything but a solid deal though. Most of them start to fall apart after just a few weeks of day-to-day use and even the brand-new ones usually charge noticeably slower than quality cables. Before long you end up with replacements and the total cost becomes much higher over time.
Even something as harmless as pocket lint can really hurt your charge experience. Once the dust, debris and other little particles get stuck in your charge port, they create a barrier that stops the cable from making solid contact with the inside connectors. Your phone might start to charge on and off randomly or it might not even see that a cable has been plugged in at all.
At times, even with all the right equipment that works just fine, there’s still one more factor that can make or break your charge speed. Wall outlets themselves have a big effect on how fast your battery fills up.
Power Sources and Their Charging Limits
Where you plug in your phone matters just as much as which cable you use and the difference is actually significant. That laptop USB port on your desk might look like the perfect place to plug in as you work but there’s a decent chance it’s only delivering about 2.5 to 5 watts of power to your phone. The wall adapter that came with your phone can probably push anywhere from 18 to over 100 watts. No wonder your phone barely budges on the battery percentage as you’re trying to get work done.
Behind each one of these specifications is simple math. Older USB 2.0 ports can only deliver about 2.5 watts max and even the newer USB 3.0 ports top out at around 4.5 watts. These numbers are way lower than what your phone wants to accept and talk about why laptop charging feels so painfully slow.
Car chargers can be even more frustrating than laptop ports. Older car chargers usually fall short and can’t put out enough power to actually charge your phone as you’re running GPS navigation at the same time. Your battery percentage could even go down though it shows that little charging symbol which is always maddening during a long road trip.
Power strips with built-in surge protectors can also slow down your charging speeds in unexpected ways. They’ll sometimes dial back the power output to keep your devices safe from electrical surges. Public charging stations at airports and coffee shops do this intentionally too – they limit how much power goes through to each port so they don’t accidentally fry someone’s expensive phone.
Compatibility problems can cause issues with fast charging. Both your phone and charger need to support the same protocols for those advanced charging features to actually work. These protocols like USB-PD or Quick Charge will only kick in if each device supports them. Even with top-of-the-line charging equipment the phone might still choose how fast it wants to charge based on its own internal programming.
Why Your Phone Charges So Slowly
Your phone could be plugged in yet what you do with it while it charges makes or breaks your charging speed. Fire up Netflix for a movie marathon and you’ll watch as the battery percentage crawls upward at a snail’s pace. Video streaming can suck power almost as fast as the charger can pump it back in and it means that you’ll run in place.
Background apps work against you in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Your phone never really rests – it always pulls down emails, backs up photos to the cloud and grabs software updates on its own. All this activity steals the power that should be going toward charging your battery. GPS navigation apps are especially brutal and can chew through 1000 mAh each hour. Mobile games are even more demanding and some heavy titles burn through 1500 mAh or more in the same timeframe.
Modern smartphone features make this charging slowdown even worse. That beautiful high-refresh-rate display that everyone raves about forces your phone to work overtime and makes every pixel refresh at lightning speed. These advanced features give you an awesome experience yet definitely slow down how fast your battery charges.
There’s actually a simple fix that lots of users miss. Flip your phone into airplane mode and watch as it charges roughly 30% faster than normal. Even better, power it down completely if you can spare a few minutes without it. With the phone switched off, every bit of juice from the charger flows straight into the battery without any competition.
Your phone never really sleeps when the screen is black and it looks completely idle. Behind the scenes, dozens of little processes keep running in the background and each one might only sip a small amount of power. All of them pile up fast and slow down your charging progress. Temperature plays a bigger role than you would expect too – extreme heat or cold will slow your charging speed to an absolute crawl.
How Temperature Affects Your Charging Speed
Temperature really affects how fast your phone charges and plenty of users have no idea just how much it matters. Battery systems have built-in protections that kick in automatically once conditions get too hot or too cold. Your phone will dramatically slow down the charging process to protect itself when the temperature climbs above 95 degrees or drops below 32 degrees.
Most users have probably experienced this at some point – you leave your phone on the dashboard during a hot summer day and later the device barely responds while it’s charging. Winter creates the same issue and it’s just on the opposite end of the scale. Battery systems just can’t work normally during extreme temperatures – their internal processes that help everything work properly become disrupted.
Cold weather makes everything inside your battery move much slower than it should. Heat creates the opposite problem (everything speeds up too much and gets unstable and can actually be dangerous) that’s why your phone has these protective measures in place and why it chooses to charge slowly instead of taking a chance on damage.
Phone cases can actually make this whole thing worse – the heavy-duty protective ones. They’re great for protection and they also trap heat like little insulators as your phone charges. All that trapped heat eventually causes your phone to slow down the charging process even more. Wireless chargers make things worse because they naturally produce more heat than regular charging cables.
Something that usually surprises people is that a phone in a very hot room with the air conditioning blasting might charge slower than one sitting in a fairly warm space. Sudden temperature changes can confuse your phone’s charging system and make it behave unpredictably. Remove your phone case and find somewhere out of direct sunlight as it charges for optimal results.
How Your Battery Gets Weak Over Time
Your phone battery won’t last forever. You probably won’t think about it until it stops working the way it should. After about 500 charge cycles (roughly two years if you plug it in every day), batteries can only hold about 80 percent of what they once did. Every lithium-ion battery ages this way – degradation happens no matter what.
Battery degradation might sound confusing but it’s straightforward. Your phone’s lithium ions shuttle back and forth between the electrodes each time you charge or drain the battery. After months of this everyday cycle, those ions leave behind deposits that clog the pathways. Everything runs slower and your battery can’t deliver the same oomph it used to.
You can actually check your battery health without taking your phone to a repair shop. iPhone users can head to Settings, tap on Battery and you’ll see your battery health percentage in plain sight. Samsung owners have to work a little harder for the same information – you’ll need to poke around in the diagnostic menus to find it.
Another telltale sign is slower charging speeds. You might start to see your phone take three hours to charge all the way up when it used to finish in ninety minutes. It just can’t accept power as fast as it did before.
Aside from slow charging, a few other red flags are worth watching for. Your phone might shut down out of the blue even when the battery shows 20 percent left, or the percentage could drop from 50 percent to 30 percent in just a few minutes of normal use. Any of these signs means that your battery probably needs to be replaced. Heat is the enemy of battery health, so leaving your phone in a hot car will only make the degradation happen faster.
Trade Your Old Phone for Cash Today
Check your cable and charger, close down background apps, find a cooler spot for your phone and accept that your battery just doesn’t hold a charge like it used to.
You actually have plenty of control over most of these factors and even some small changes can make a pretty obvious difference in how fast your phone charges up. These simple changes deliver results quickly too. Flip your phone into airplane mode as it’s charging, grab a charger with more watts behind it, or just let your phone take a breather from those demanding apps – any of these moves can speed up charging in no time.
Battery wear is definitely something that everyone deals with sooner or later. Knowledge of what these different pieces do helps you squeeze more life out of your device long before it turns into a problem. Most batteries start showing their age after you’ve charged them about 500 times or so.
Sometimes the smartest move is knowing when to ditch an old phone instead of putting up with those annoyingly slow charging speeds day in and day out. If your phone’s charging problems already have you thinking about an upgrade, at ecoATM we’ll turn that sluggish device into cash for your next phone.
With over 6,000 kiosks across the country, you can get instant diagnostics and walk out with cash or get an online payment on that same day and help the environment too. Find a location near you and see what your phone is worth today.
