I am doing research on best practices for my lithium batteries and lifepo4 powerstation. There’s some conflicting opinions and variation for cycle numbers.
Will leaving my things plugged in at 100% hurt it more than constantly unplugging at 80% and replugging at 20%?
My understanding is that it depends on the device, and most modern devices take care of what’s best by themselves
That’s not true.
Lithium batteries have a longer useful life if not allowed to drop too low or charged too high. 20% and 80% are typical values. Ideally they would be at 50% SOC and that’s why most batteries in new devices will arrive charged to around 3.6-3.8v.
This creates a problem for device manufacturers because if they force the device to treat the battery well, users won’t get as long between charges. They will sometimes give you options (most laptops will have a setting to stop it charging beyond 60% or 80%, some phones will have a setting to stop it charging to full) but they’ll advertise the full battery runtime they can squeeze out while damaging the battery and that will be the default setting.
Convenience dictates that you may need to charge above, or discharge below, the recommended levels. Which would be much less of an issue if batteries were easily replaceable. But increasingly, they’re not.
tldr; manufacturers have zero incentive to make sure their devices treat the batteries well
as long as they survive the warranty period