Okay, so yesterday I was messing around with my phone chargers, trying to figure out which one was actually charging my phone the fastest. You know, that classic problem.
First thing I did was grab a bunch of different chargers. I had the one that came with my phone, a couple of older ones from previous phones, and even one of those fancy multi-port USB charging bricks. Just a random assortment, really.
Then, I needed to figure out how to actually measure the wattage. I remembered I had this USB power meter lying around. It’s a little gadget that plugs in between the charger and your phone, and it shows you the voltage and current. Wattage is just voltage times current, so it does the math for you.
I started by plugging in the original charger that came with my phone. I let it charge for a bit, then checked the meter. It was showing something like 5V and 2A, which works out to 10 watts. Not bad, but I suspected some of the others might be better.
Next up was one of my old chargers. This one was ancient, probably from like 5 phones ago. Plugged it in, and the meter showed a measly 5V and 0.5A. That’s only 2.5 watts! No wonder my phone always took forever to charge with that thing.
I went through all the chargers one by one, writing down the wattage for each. The multi-port brick actually surprised me – some of the ports were faster than others, even though they all looked the same. I guess it’s worth paying attention to those little labels they sometimes put on the ports.
Here’s what I learned:
- Not all chargers are created equal. The older ones are definitely slower.
- That USB power meter is actually pretty handy for this kind of stuff.
- Even within the same charger, some ports can be faster than others.
After all that testing, I figured out which charger to use for a quick boost and which ones to leave for overnight charging. Simple, but now I actually know what’s going on instead of just guessing!
Might seem like a small thing, but it’s kinda cool to see the actual numbers and understand how it all works. Plus, now I can finally ditch those super slow chargers that were just taking up space.