It's easy to think of charging a Dewalt DC9182 battery as though you're filling a tub with "power." Just hook up the hose until it's full! From the outside, that's exactly how it works, but on the inside it's a little more nuanced. A lithium-ion battery typically charges in two stages. First comes the process called constant current charging. This is the part that really is pretty simple. The charger for your phone or tablet will apply a steady current of electricity to the battery to get all those electrons back to the anode. During this stage, the charger just decides how much power is coming out of the firehose and starts spraying. The higher that constant current, the faster the battery can charge. High-voltage quick chargers—like the ones that are starting to come with a lot of new phones—take advantage of this first stage to cram in the juice as quickly as possible at the cost of a bit of extra stress on the Dewalt DCB182 drill battery. When the battery is 70 percent recharged, the procedure changes and flips over to constant voltage charging. During this second stage, the charger makes sure that the voltage—that is, the difference in current between the battery and the charger—stays the same rather than keeping the current constant. Practically, this means that as the battery gets closer to full, the current the charger sends into it decreases. As the battery gets full, the rate at which it charges slows down. Once you reach 100 percent, the charge simply trickles in, just enough to account for the tiny, tiny bit of charge your battery loses naturally over time. So what about over charging? Is that something you need to worry about? No. I talked to Andrew Goldberg, a technical writer for iFixit, who explained why. All modern Li-Ion rechargeable devices have some sort of power management IC, designed to prevent overcharging the Dewalt DCB184 tool battery. They'll keep your phone battery topped off and ready to go throughout the night with a trickle charge at most.
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