You have old chargers from all your old phones still lying around the house. Can you use these discarded chargers to power your brand-new phone?


Consider this scenario: you’ve recently gotten a new phone, but you’ve lost the phone’s charger. Luckily, you have a couple of older chargers from your older phones. First, you should make sure your current phone’s battery is operating efficiently.

You might wonder for convenience sake, will it harm my new phone’s battery to charge my device with an older charger? You want to consider several factors when determining if your old charger will effectively charge your new phone.

Factors to Consider When Using Your Old Phone Charger

Your new phone and your old charger are likely different voltages. New phones will likely recognize old chargers at lower voltages than the charger designed to go with the phone. However, the phone will adjust to the old charger’s voltage, meaning that the phone itself and the battery will not be harmed. However, since the phone is recognizing the voltage as low, it will also charge much more slowly than it would with its new charger.

The problem with using an old charger, too, is that you’ll have to test its voltage if you don’t already know it. If you want to test your phone charger’s voltage, you’ll have to set up an experiment with a multimeter — an experiment that is likely more trouble than it’s worth. It is recommended that if you lose your current charger, you replace it with the charger specifically designed for your phone model for faster charging.

So, what are you supposed to do with all those old phone chargers lying around? If you’re a mechanically-minded person, you could wire up the old charger to power a homemade thermostat. Of, if you don’t want to work on a mechanical project, you could always head to Best Buy. Each location has a bin near the door where you can drop off old chargers or batteries, and they will recycle them for you. Before you go, check Best Buy’s website to make sure they’ll take what you’re trying to recycle. Be warned that you can only recycle so many electronic items per day.