Tips on keeping your cellphone battery healthy

NEW YORK -- Losing power on your cellphone is always a worry, but Consumer Reports has some tips on how you can make your phone battery last longer on a single charge. First, consider your phone's display.

"Phones have big, beautiful screens on them now, right? Full-color screens. And those screens command an awful lot of power. You can go into the settings and lower the brightness on the phone," said Chris Raymond, Consumer Reports.

You can also adjust the amount of time your phone stays on before it goes into sleep mode.

"So you can go into the settings and adjust it so that your phone goes to sleep after 30 seconds rather than waiting a minute or a minute and a half," Raymond said.

Another way to save power is to turn off some of the background activity that happens on your phone, like your apps.

"Social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, those will continually refresh throughout the day. But most people don't need that information to be updated every half hour, every hour in the course of their day," Raymond said. "So you can actually go into the settings and adjust them so that those notifications or those updates are not happening on that continual basis."

Switching to low-power mode will help save battery power.

Keep your phone protected from extreme heat or cold, which adds stress on the battery.

And try to avoid waiting until you're almost out of power to charge your phone.

"You want to keep them charged sort of between 20 and 80% as long as you can. That's the ideal stretch to be in," Raymond said.

Experts say charging your phone overnight won't harm the battery.

"That is not an issue. The phones these days are designed to recognize when they get to that 100% and to stop the charge there," he said.

If you think you need a new battery, replacing it is an option.

"When you get to the point where you're starting to kind of worry about is my battery going to make it through the course of a normal day, go and take a look at like the cost of the replacement for you," Raymond said.