Leaving Phone On 24/7

[AC Question]

Hi, I plan on leaving my old phone on and plugged in 24/7 as a surveillance camera. I've left it on for the night and it is warm to the touch around the phone. Will it be alright to leave?

Thanks

 

[nahoku]

If the phone is still warm after being left on a charger overnight, then the battery is bad... meaning, it never charged fully even after an all night charge. Might not be a good idea, but that's up to you. How long will the phone stay on just on battery power?

 

[Rukbat]

If by "Warm" you mean it's not as cold as a piece of plastic sitting next to it, that's normal. My phone is running at 26.3°C at the moment, and the last time it was turned off was probably a few weeks ago. It'll get warmer than that iif it's charging. (It doesn't charge all the time it's plugged in - once it's fully charged, the charger turns off, and doesn't come back on until it's dropped a percent or two - and then it's only charging for a few minutes.)

I've had phones used as surveillance cameras for years at a time, outdoors where they were subjected to 90°F+ temperatures, and they never failed due to heat. (One got drowned - the rain was so wind-driven that it got into what I thought would be sufficient cover.)

As for leaving phones plugged in, my Motorola V551, which I got when it was released in 2004 (I was a dealer at the time), has been in use or on a charger for 11-1/2 years now, and the original battery is still good. It's my "I don't care if it gets stolen or broken" emergency phone now, but it still works after all those years of being on the charger. Lithium battery systems are designed for that kind of use. (Just don't deep discharge them - a discharge to 5% once a week will kill the battery in a year or two at best, but probably in 6 months.)

 

[nahoku]

2 years ago, a friend of mine sustained ~ $140,000 damage to his house/garage when a laptop he had in his shop caught fire. It was his shop laptop that was plugged in 24/7, and he was at work at the time. Insurance paid to have his garage rebuilt, house repainted, furniture and clothes replaced. About a year ago, my brother's Motorola cell (can't remember the model) wasn't holding much of a charge, so he found himself leaving the phone on the charger more often than not. Because the phone was in a Defender case, he didn't notice anything unusual going on with the phone until one day he noticed the screen side of the phone felt "warped". I was there when we pulled the phone out of the case and the battery was so bloated it pushed the screen out. If that phone had caught fire while plugged in unattended, he could have stood a substantial loss to his home.

I'm not saying anything like this can happen to you, but my engineering background tells me it's not a safe thing to do unless you somehow can run the phone without the battery. I'm not discounting Rukbat's experience, but the above was my own and why I stated, it's up to you.