Phone charger plugged in the arm rest

I was wondering if the light on my phone charger plugged inside the arm rest is a concern if it's on 24/7. I know when plugged into the front adapter it turns off with the ignition off.

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a concern how?

hes wondering if it will discharge the battery. the power used for the light (the phone not being attached) is almost nothing. I wouldn't worry about it unless your going to leave the car sitting for many days...or plug into the front. I ran a long cord ($4 on dx.com) through the dash to left side of steering where I have a mount as I use my phone for GPS.

Battery consumption. Harmless though, right?

Thanks!

yeah the amount of draw on a tiny led like that would take a very very very long time to affect your battery enough to cause an issue starting

Put it this way, a 15 LED flash light that takes 2 AA batteries can run for about 8 hours give or take. Keep in mind those LEDS are supper bright and take lots of power, but lets take worse case here and do some math. Lets reduce the number of LEDs to just one, so the amount of time 2 AA batteries will last will be roughly be 14 times more. So 8 hours times 14 = 112. So 1 LED powered by 2 AA batteries can last for 112 Hours. We want to know just 1 AA battery so divide the time in half and you get 56 hours. A single AA battery is aprox 2500 mAh (for an Alkaline) lets get rid of the mili of the miliAmp Hours by multiplying it by 1000 so that is 0.25 Ah. A typical car battery is about 60 Ah. 0.25 goes into 60, 240 times, so there is the aprox equivalent of 240 AA batteries in a car battery. If a single battery could run a LED for 56 hours then 240 batteries could run it for 13440 hours, or 560 days. So 1 year and 195 days... that is a long time to never start or use your car once.

Please feel free to tear apart the math, I have used worse case settings here, super bright LED (which your car charger is not maybe a 10th of what a flash light led is) I have used a standard car battery.

You can leave it plugged in, i am sure the computer for the car takes 15 time what the LED does to stay alive!!

Caspan said:

You can leave it plugged in, i am sure the computer for the car takes 15 time what the LED does to stay alive!!

Click to expand...

The car has 12 Volts and the cell phone probably runs on 3 volts for all the chips. Some chargers step down 12 volts to what the phone uses which generates heat or the phone will step it down so it uses a lot more power than a led. After your charger has been plugged in for more than 30 minutes feel of it and your phone. If either is warmer that the surrounding metal it indicates energy usage. I would not leave it plugged in more than 24 hours perhaps depending on how warm it is, but thats me... There is quite a bit of other "quite current" load on the car battery such as the radio listening for the door fob, security monitoring, maintaining all your radio stations that go away when you pull the battery cable, all the engine running parameters etc, so this cell phone load is additive.

a2+b2=c2

I know this one was a freak thing but I sometimes worry about it overheating and ending up like this:


someone posted it on another forum a long time back and it is supposedly from a phone charger overheating.