Keeping your Nintendo Switch battery healthy is crucial for your long-term enjoyment of the popular home console/handheld hybrid.
While revised models, such as last year’s Nintendo Switch OLED, have made improvements to overall battery life, if you don’t make an effort to care for your system you’ll quickly find your Switch demanding a recharge at increasingly more regular intervals. Whatever model you’ve got, even if it’s a Nintendo Switch Lite, it’s a good idea to be looking after your battery.
To help, Nintendo has offered some simple steps for preserving your Switch's battery life. These are perfect for anyone suffering Nintendo Switch battery problems. While performing them won’t bring back battery capacity already lost, this advice will help prevent further battery drain issues.
This advice was posted to an official Nintendo customer support page in Japan, but it's been translated via NintendoLife. Here’s how Nintendo recommends you keep your Switch battery healthy.
How to keep your Nintendo Switch battery healthy
- Remove your Nintendo Switch from its dock and disconnect any power cables.
- Go to System Settings, and scroll down to Sleep Mode.
- From the Sleep Mode menu, set Auto-Sleep (Playing on Console Screen) to never.
- Start any Switch game and load it up to the title screen.
- Now leave your Switch running with the screen switched on.
- Wait until the battery fully drains and your Switch shuts itself off.
- Finally, plug your Switch into a charger and leave for at least four hours.
How useful is this Nintendo Switch battery advice?
As noted above, these steps are a good way of preserving your Switch’s current battery capacities and maintaining its long-term health. This method isn’t a miracle cure that will boost an aging Switch’s battery life, but it should help with battery drain issues.
Fully discharging a battery before doing a recharge is fairly standard advice for rechargeable devices. We recommend following the same method with any smartphone or portable Bluetooth speaker you may own.
To avoid any potential screen burn-in issues, particularly with the Nintendo Switch OLED model, we advise performing these steps when your battery level is already relatively low. Definitely don’t leave an OLED screen sitting on the same static image for hours at a time, or your gonna have a bad time.
If you’re looking for additional helpful tips to get the most out of your Nintendo Switch, we’ve got a guide for transferring data between models as well as a walkthrough of the new folders feature added in a system patch earlier this year. Plus, a roundup of the best Nintendo Switch games you can currently buy.
