Charge phone in car or at home?

ron99999

I drive my car every day and so my phone is charged in the car every day, I never need to charge it at home.
Just had a friend tell me that the cost of petrol charging the phone is a lot more than it would cost me to charge the phone of mains power at home.
True or false?

Sea_Shell

I have no idea...but I'd be interested in the maths behind it!

I suppose part of the answer would lie in whether a running engine provides more juice for the electrical system than it needs, so by charging your phone your purely mopping up excess energy that would otherwise be wasted.   Or whether your taking "extra" energy out of the system.

Hmmm interesting.

matelodave

It might be a bit more expensive as you are generating leccy from the engine in the car  but you'd have to be pretty clever to work out exactly how much it's actually costing compared with everything else that the engine is powering.

TBH the cost difference between charging in the car and at home is probably negligible so I shouldn't lose any sleep over it unless you really want to do the sums. Work out how much energy your phone uses (how many watt/hrs a day), then work out how much it would cost to produce that energy from the car or from your energy supplier

A quick trawl of t'interweb suggest that the cost is just over £1 a year if you charge your phone every day ( I guess a lot depends on how much you use it, whether you play games or just use it as a phone or even how much you pay for yourleccy). So even if you double or triple the cost by charging it in the car, it's not gonna break the bank

tim_p

I bet you couldn’t even measure any excess petrol usage to charge a phone, even in a lab!  

btr30

I would suggest it does possibly cost more in vehicle fuel via home electricity, but costs will be fractions of pennies in either method.
If you are worried just charge the phone at the office

matelodave

A quick and dirty calc for home energy cost - assuming your phone has a 4000mA/hr battery at 5 volts = 20watt/hours to charge it. That's means you'd get 50 full charges per kwh, assume 12p/kwh = 0.25p a charge. Even if you charge it every day in your car and it cost you a penny a charge it's still less than the cost of one gallon of fuel a year. Your headlights will cost more than that to run

st999

Make sure the cables aren't too long

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/experts/article-8595479/Do-shorter-cables-charge-quicker-damage-devices-battery-life.html

Gerry1

st999 said:

Make sure the cables aren't too long

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/experts/article-8595479/Do-shorter-cables-charge-quicker-damage-devices-battery-life.html

Absolute nonsense article written by people who simply haven't a clue between them.

matelodave

st999 said:

Make sure the cables aren't too long

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/experts/article-8595479/Do-shorter-cables-charge-quicker-damage-devices-battery-life.html

at your age you should know better than to promulgate this nonsense. It's click-bait for morons