Unplug your charged phone, save the world
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Oct 11th 2006 2:07PM
posted Oct 11th 2006 2:07PM
Who knew that leaving a fully-charged phone plugged in to the wall was such a problem? Nokia's formed a new group -- including rival Motorola, among others -- with the aim of educating folks on ways to use their phones in environmentally conscious ways, a move that seems appropriate for the company recently named greenest among cellphone manufacturers.. Among other initiatives, the group will be pushing to add reminders to phones' displays to unplug them once they've been topped off, a change that Nokia says would power about 60,000 homes a year if just 10 percent of the populace complied. The obvious question is, don't the phones begin discharging once they've been unplugged, thereby requiring deeper and longer charging the next time they're jacked in?
Instead of "educating" the populace (a shaky proposition, at best) why can't these companies devote their brilliant R&T dept to cut one day from their "can we make it thinner" mantra & build a charger that isn't a vampire? Seriously, I can't figure out why we can't get devices that just stop pulling current once there's no longer a need.
Anthony,
thats probably because if this happened then once the phone fully charged it would stop charging, then the phone would begin using up battery and after like a minute the phone would think "Hey, Im not charged 100% anymore" and so would start a cycle that would probably kill your battery life much faster than it already does.
Mr Mario: That's interesting, but again, some brainiac somewhere could build the charger to go to 100%, then allow a dropdown of, say, 10% before beginning to refuel.
Truly if someone's charging their phone & leaving it on the charger until it loses significant juice w/o usage then why do they have the phone in the 1st place? Or how about alkaline rechargables. I remember those from yonder (or new version that's out http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/08/hybrio-batteries-bridge-gap-between-disposables-and-rechargables/) that doesn't lose charge sitting around.
Look up Sanyo Eneloops, they are similar to the Hybrio's. I bought some for my D-SLR the other day b/c I was tired of leaving in the regular rechargeable batteries, only to find them almost dead a few days later. So far *knock on wood* the Eneloops have been perfect.
As far as the charger goes, not only would a 10% drop be good, you could go as far as letting the phone tell the charger what to do. i.e. the charger isn't pulling anything while on the wall, you plug in the phone, a circuit is completed, the charge starts, when the phone is full, it tells the charger no more, disconnects the circuit and won't draw more power until at least 10% (maybe programmable by user) power drop and/or the phone is disconnect and reconnect again. You could get even trickier (and really increase charger costs I imagine) and install a small battery in the charger itself that takes over as a maintenance charger once the phone is full. It would be smart enough to only draw the power needed for later maintenance when the phone is plugged in. Lots of easy ideas.
If they stopped charging the phone and let it start draining, you could easily pull your phone off of the charger in the morning with only 10% battery (in the example where it waits till the batt is at 10% before beginning to charge again.
A better solution would be to electrically disconnect the battery from the phone after it's charged, so the phone is only using wall power. Then it's drawing just as much juice from the wall as it would have from the battery (which gets it from the wall to begin with). So long as it's not using EXTRA energy, nothing is wasted (since unplugging the phone doesn't stop it from drawing energy....)
-Taylor
The chargers never stop drawing electricity, which is why you get "phantom charging" when you leave certain electronics plugged into your power strip throughout the day. Even if your phone requires you to add a little more electricity to charge it up once the battery's been drained, the electricity it asks for is nothing compared to the amount that's been seeping through your charger, going nowhere, for the rest of the day/three days (depending on how good your phone's battery is).